The Ukrainian team visiting Oslo in late August came armed with a hefty research report—73 packed pages of open-source intelligence and policy proposals designed to help Norway prepare for a confrontation with Russia. The most likely scenario, the paper warned, would be more like the Battle of Britain than Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s 3.8 million-man World War II invasion of the Soviet Union. Moscow is unlikely to send tanks or troops to Norway, the report said. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin knows he can’t win a direct military clash with NATO. More likely would be a combined blitz of drone assaults, sabotage, and cyberattacks—what the paper compiled by the Kyiv-based Sahaidachnyi Security Center and paid for by the Ukrainian drone manufacturer Buntar Aerospace called the “Battle of Norway.”
But even the hawkish Ukrainian team was unprepared for what hit Norway just days later on August 24. The day after Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited Kyiv, promising continued support and a fourth annual payment of $9.1 billion, a pro-Russia hacker group calling itself Server Killers startled the Nordic nation with social media post. “We declare cyber war” on Norway, the message read—white letters against a fiery background featuring an image of the Kremlin and a Russian flag.
Server Killers is an experienced hacking collective with documented Moscow connections and a long rap sheet—attacks in Britain, Canada, Denmark, Spain, and Romania. Over the next three days, it targeted Digdir, the agency overseeing Norway’s cutting-edge digitization of public services, bombarding its servers with so much spam that government websites stopped working for citizens. The “distributed denial of service attack” was the largest in Norway’s history—if not the start of the battle of Norway, certainly an alarming warning.
Disruptive as it was for Norwegians, the Server Killer attack hardly made international news—Russia is now launching so many so-called “hybrid” or “gray-zone” assaults on Europe that it can be hard to keep track of them.
