Six European countries have appointed cyber experts to form a cyber rapid-response team (CRRT) to deploy across Europe and assist Ukraine against cyber attacks committed by Russia, the BBC reports.
Experts from Lithuania, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Romania, and the Netherlands will be on alert for Russian cyber attacks, with European officials noting that future attacks are to be expected, given that they have already occurred several times in the recent past.
"We can see that cyber-measures are an important part of Russia's hybrid toolkit," the CRRT official said, adding that the newly formed team is "composed of different cyber-expertise, such as incident response, forensics, vulnerability assessment, to be able to react to a variety of scenarios."
Russia has previously been accused of so-called hybrid warfare, combining cyber-attacks with traditional military activity, in Georgia and Crimea and now in Ukraine, with banks and government websites attacked several weeks ago.
In 2015 and 2016, thousands of homes in multiple Ukrainian cities were cut off from power supplies after hackers attacked electricity substations. At the time, the European Union and Ukraine blamed Russia for the attacks; Russia denied its involvment, calling the allegations "Russophobic."