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Finnish police have detained a vessel suspected of damaging an undersea telecoms cable running from Helsinki to Estonia across the Gulf of Finland.

The cargo vessel, the Fitburg, was sailing from St Petersburg to the port of Haifa in Israel, under the flag of St Vincent and Grenadines.

All 14 crew members were arrested after the cable owned by Finnish telecoms operator Elisa was damaged. The operator said in a statement that the damage had “not affected the functionality of Elisa’s services in any way”, and that its services had been re-routed.

Police said they were investigating “aggravated disruption of telecommunications” and “aggravated sabotage and attempted aggravated sabotage”.

The detained crew members were Russian, Georgian, Kazakh and Azerbaijani, police added.

Undersea cables carry crucial electricity and data between countries, and keep people connected to the internet. The Baltic Sea has seen a series of incidents in recent years in which underwater cables have been damaged or completely cut.

On Wednesday morning, the Finnish authorities sent a helicopter and a patrol ship to the area, where they found the vessel was dragging its anchor in the sea, Finland’s coastguard said.

They said they had “launched operations this morning to investigate the suspected cable damage” after telecoms provider Elisa detected a fault.

Finnish police said the authorities had “taken control of the vessel as part of a joint operation”.

“At this stage, the police are investigating the incident as aggravated criminal damage, attempted aggravated criminal damage, and aggravated interference with telecommunications,” the police added.

“Finland is prepared for security challenges of various kinds, and we respond to them as necessary,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said in a statement on social media.

At a press conference, police were asked by journalists if the cable was damaged on behalf of another country, local media reported.

Police Chief Ilkka Koskimäki replied that “the police or other authorities do not speculate on these matters. The police’s job is to investigate what happened.”

Eight Nato countries border the Baltic Sea – Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden – which also borders Russia.

Estonia’s government said a second telecoms cable connecting it to Finland also suffered an outage on Wednesday. The country’s President Alar Karis said “hopefully it was not a deliberate act, but the investigation will clarify”.

The European Commission was closely monitoring the incident, EU technology commissioner Henna Virkkunen posted on X, adding that it was prepared to counter “hybrid threats”.

Many experts and political leaders have viewed the recent incidents of suspected cable sabotage as part of a “hybrid war” carried out by Russia against Western countries. The issue has come under increased focus since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“We’re already talking about national security. Critical infrastructure is the front line,” the Finnish MP Jarno Limnell commented on the incident, in a post on X.

Dec 31, 2026Ravie LakshmananSoftware Security / Data Breach

Trust Wallet on Tuesday revealed that the second iteration of the Shai-Hulud (aka Sha1-Hulud) supply chain outbreak in November 2025 was likely responsible for the hack of its Google Chrome extension, ultimately resulting in the theft of approximately $8.5 million in assets.

“Our Developer GitHub secrets were exposed in the attack, which gave the attacker access to our browser extension source code and the Chrome Web Store (CWS) API key,” the company said in a post-mortem published Tuesday.

“The attacker obtained full CWS API access via the leaked key, allowing builds to be uploaded directly without Trust Wallet’s standard release process, which requires internal approval/manual review.”

Subsequently, the attacker is said to have registered the domain “metrics-trustwallet[.]com” and pushed a trojanized version of the extension with a backdoor that’s capable of harvesting users’ wallet mnemonic phrases to the sub-domain “api.metrics-trustwallet[.]com.”

The disclosure comes days after Trust Wallet urged about one million users of its Chrome extension to update to version 2.69 after a malicious update (version 2.68) was pushed by unknown threat actors on December 24, 2025, to the browser’s extension marketplace.

The security incident ultimately led to $8.5 million in cryptocurrency assets being drained from 2,520 wallet addresses to no less than 17 wallet addresses controlled by the attacker. The first wallet-draining activity was publicly reported a day after the malicious update.

Trust Wallet has since initiated a reimbursement claim process for impacted victims. The company noted that reviews of submitted claims are ongoing and are being handled on a case-by-case basis. It also stressed that processing times may vary with each case due to the need to distinguish between victims and bad actors, and further protect against fraud.

To prevent such breaches from occurring again, Trust Wallet said it has implemented additional monitoring capabilities and controls related to its release processes.

“Sha1-Hulud was an industry-wide software supply chain attack that affected companies across multiple sectors, including but not limited to crypto,” the company said. “It involved malicious code being introduced and distributed through commonly-used developer tooling. This allowed attackers to gain access through trusted software dependencies rather than directly targeting individual organizations.”

Trust Wallet’s disclosure coincides with the emergence of Shai-Hulud 3.0 with increased obfuscation and reliability improvements, while still remaining laser-focused on stealing secrets from developer machines.

“The primary difference lies in string obfuscation, error handling, and Windows compatibility, all aimed at increasing campaign longevity rather than introducing novel exploitation techniques,” Upwind researchers Guy Gilad and Moshe Hassan said.