In September 2024, Dutch cybersecurity experts discovered that someone had burrowed into the computer systems of the National Police Force and accessed the email account of a police employee.The intruder, or group, had used a stolen cookie -- a piece of data temporarily stored on a user's device by web browsers -- to access the person’s electronic address book.That meant the intruder had access to all the contacts in the person’s email; including potentially all 64,000 employees of the police force, not to mention possibly names of sources or informants used by the police.For the first time, “the Netherlands had fallen victim to deliberate cyber sabotage by a Russian-backed group,” the country’s military intelligence agency concluded in a report. The group, which was later given the nickname Laundry Bear “has proved particularly successful.”“It blew up in the media. It caused a lot of unrest” among Dutch lawmakers, security agencies, and the wider public, said Bart van den Berg, who was lead intelligence analyst and crisis manager at the government National Cyber Security Center. “It was a sensitive issue.”Fast forward two years, Denis Obrezko, a 35-year-old IT programmer from the central Russian region of Samara, was detained on November 6 by Thai police on a US arrest warrant. In his hotel room in the resort city of Phuket, police seized Obrezko’s laptop, mobile phone, and a digital wallet.