A British minister is set to suggest that hacking groups aligned with Russia were behind at least nine cyberattacks on NATO member states and that South Korea was also a recent target.

That is according to the British daily the Guardian, which cited excerpts of an expected address to a NATO cybersecurity conference in London on Monday by Pat McFadden, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister for intergovernmental relations.

McFadden, who is the most senior minister in the Cabinet Office after the prime minister, is expected to say that “unofficial hacktivists” given impunity by the Kremlin are committing increasingly frequent and increasingly sophisticated attacks around the world.

He is set to say that “Russian state-aligned groups” are responsible for at least nine separate cyberattacks of varying severity against NATO states, and that South Korea was also targeted for monitoring the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia.

The targeting of South Korea apparently refers to the large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks on the official websites of South Korea’s defense ministry and Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this month.