NOVO-OGARYOVO — Three days after a drone attack halted Yandex’s data center in Vladimir, President Vladimir Putin convened the Security Council secretary, the central bank governor, the head of the Federal Security Service, Moscow’s mayor and Sberbank’s chief executive to discuss raising Russia’s digital security.
Putin said in his opening remarks, published by the Kremlin, that cyberthreats to the economy, logistics, transport, social services and public administration “have reached a new level” amid “direct and hybrid acts of external aggression.” He asked for better risk assessment, “monitoring dependence on external platforms” and faster response to cyberattacks, and for closer coordination between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, telecom operators, financial institutions and internet companies.
The Kremlin’s text stops there. It ends with Putin asking Sberbank’s German Gref to speak first, and the reports from Gref and the other participants were not published.
What the meeting answers is physical. According to TASS, Yandex shut its Vladimir data center completely on October 11 after a drone attack, several modules at its Kaluga site were put out of service on October 9, and a fire damaged part of the infrastructure at Sasovo. Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev told RBC that the ministry helped Yandex secure additional sites and that the company moved key systems to backup facilities “despite the unprecedented attack.” TEH reported the effect on drivers when drones hit Yandex data centers and Moscow taxi drivers were told to use another map.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the authorities are in dialogue with business about the strikes, which he attributed to Kyiv. “All the companies are taking measures to ensure physical security, although these are clearly very complex and rather costly measures,” he said, according to TASS.
Putin framed the meeting as part of a wider push. “Today, Russia is consistently strengthening its sovereignty, and in all areas at that, from basic food and energy security to digital infrastructure,” he said, according to the Kremlin transcript. The agenda was information security; the attacks described this week arrived by drone.
Who else attended is a measure of how the Kremlin ranks the problem: Dmitry Medvedev, Sergei Shoigu, Sergei Kiriyenko, the FSB’s Alexander Bortnikov, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin among them. What none of the published material says is when Yandex’s Vladimir facility will come back, or whether the meeting produced a decision. The reports reviewed for this article contain no Ukrainian comment on the strikes.
