The National Cyber Security Center of Lithuania is tasked with investigating the technical aspects, while the Strategic Communication units of the country’s Defense and Foreign ministries take on the disinformation angle, producing their own assessment of the nature of the attack.
“Both institutions rarely share evidence directly specifying who's behind it. This time they say they're ‘working hard on it’,” Saldžiūnas said.
However, there are “some clues” about hackers, Saldžiūnas said, “like sloppy English and Lithuanian.”
“I've been writing on both military deployments and debunking fake stories for years, so I believe it was just a matter of time before I became a target,” Saldžiūnas said, adding: “My bet would be on local proxies, perhaps on a payroll. The anti-American, anti-NATO, pro-Kremlin narrative correlation is uncanny.”
NATO -- and specifically the U.S. -- troops in the Baltics have long been the targets of the Russian disinformation, including cyber operations. Besides the fake “request to deploy nuclear weapons” in Lithuania cited above, among the most reported cases was a fake story about a U.S. military vehicle accidentally killing a local boy and getting away with the crime.
