Poland has said it faced a sharp surge in cyberattacks in 2025.
During the morning and afternoon of Dec. 29, coordinated cyberattacks hit a combined heat and power plant supplying heat to almost 500,000 customers, as well as multiple wind and solar farms in Poland.
Polish authorities suspected the cyberattacks were done by a single “threat actor,” with multiple experts pointing to culprits linked to Russian secret services.alarmed Polish authorities so much that the agency CERT Polska, or Computer Emergency Response Team Poland, issued a public report in late January on technical details of the incident and asked the cyber community for any input on what happened.“We’ve had such incidents in the past, but they were of the ransomware type, where the motivation of the attacker is financial," Dudek said. “In this case, there was no financial motivation — the motivation was just destruction.” He said that Poland has seen only a few destructive incidents in the past and none of them were in the energy sector. Dudek said that he wasn't aware of any other destructive cyberattacks on the energy sector in either NATO or EU countries. There have been espionage incidents and activist groups causing marginal damage, but “advanced attacks” like the December one in Poland are likely unprecedented, he said. Had it targeted even larger energy units, it could have substantially impacted the stability of Poland's energy grid, Dudek said.Dudek's team is authorized only to describe the modus operandi and point to a likely “threat actor” — cyber jargon for an individual or group engaging in malicious activity.The CERT analysis looked at the Internet infrastructure used in the Polish attack, including domains and IP addresses, and found that they had been used previously by a Russian threat actor known as “Dragonfly,” and also called “Static Tundra” or “Berserk Bear.” Dudek said Dragonfly has been known to target the energy sector, but so far not with a destructive attack. According to an alert issued by the FBI in the United States in August 2025, Dragonfly is a cybersecurity cluster associated with FSB Center 16, a key unit within Russia’s Federal Security Service. Experts unrelated to Polish authorities agree that the traces of the December attack lead back to Russia. ESET, one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the EU, analyzed the malware used in the attack and concluded the culprit likely was “Sandworm,” another possible Russian actor previously associated with destructive attacks in Ukraine.to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or GRU. Anton Cherepanov, senior malware researcher at ESET, told The Associated Press that “the use of data-wiping malware and its deployment” in the Polish case “are both techniques commonly employed by Sandworm.” “We are not aware of any other recently active threat actors that have used data-wiping malware in their operations against targets in European Union countries,” Cherepanov added. Whether Dragonfly or Sandworm, it would an actor previously affiliated with Russia. “Whether it’s these Russians or those Russians is a detail,” Cherepanov said.Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 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