Swedish officials blame downtime on solar flares

Apr 13, 2016 19:45 GMT  ·  By

Without acknowledging it officially, Swedish authorities are blaming the Russian government for carrying out cyber-attacks on the country's air traffic control infrastructure that grounded flights for a day last November, Norwegian site Aldrimer.no reports.

The attacks took place on November 4, 2015, when multiple airports in Sweden, and especially the Arlanda, Landvetter and Bromma airports, had to cancel and ground internal and international flights.

That afternoon, Swedish officials posted the following message on the airports' websites, blaming the whole incident on solar flares.

  This afternoon, aircraft flying over Sweden were affected by a solar storm phenomena. This can cause disruptions of the earth’s magnetic field. As a result there were disruptions to LFV radar facilities in Sweden, since solar storms can degrade air traffic controllers’ ability to direct traffic in the air.  

The Norwegian newspaper is claiming that no other country faced difficulties or had to cancel flights that day due to solar flares. According to the US Space Weather Prediction Center, solar flares peaked on November 2 and 3, and were declining on the day of the incident.

Russia scheduled cyber war exercises on the same day

Reporters claim that while this message was plastered on the airports' and LFV (Civil Aviation Administration) websites, Sweden's officials were secretly informing NATO of cyber-attacks. Sweden is not a member of NATO, but neighboring country Norway is.

Coincidentally or not, on November 4, Russia scheduled electronic warfare activity in the Baltic Sea region, about the same time Sweden experienced its air traffic control downtime.

According to reports, Russia installed a new radio tower near the city of Kaliningrad. Aldrimer.no cites sources that say they've traced strong signals back to this tower during November 4.

Almost all Baltic countries have unofficially accused Russia of probing their cyber-defenses over the past months. With the arctic polar cap melting, more territories and small islands in the Arctic Sea are opening up, and Russia, Norway, Sweden, and Finland are in a fight to grab these new islands that are surfacing from underneath the ice.

Tensions are already high, and Russia probing their neighbors' defensive capabilities or infecting high-ranking officials with malware is exactly what you would expect at this point.