Ukraine’s government accused unnamed Russian adversaries of massive cyberattacks that targeted the country’s security and defense websites.
Unknown adversaries attacked the websites of the Security Service of Ukraine, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, resources of other state institutions, and strategic enterprises.
On Monday, Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council warned of a new mechanism of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.
“The National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity at the NSDC of Ukraine records massive DDoS attacks on the Ukrainian segment of the Internet, mainly on the websites of the security and defense sector.”
They determined that these coordinated attacks originated from addresses belonging to certain Russian traffic networks.
The NSDC of Ukraine didn’t reveal whether any damage had been done nor said who it believed was behind the assault.
During the analysis, the NSDC’s researchers saw a new mechanism of cyberattacks that the attackers used to bombard strategical websites with distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which they didn’t observe before in similar incidents.
During a DDOS attack cybercriminals flood a victim’s network with high volumes of data traffic that essentially paralyzes it.
As a result of such an attack, government web servers are infected with a virus that covertly uses them as part of a botnet for DDoS attacks on other websites. Once web servers are compromised, Internet providers see them as a source of attacks and automatically blacklist them. The compromised websites remain blocked even after the DDoS phase of the attack.
Kyiv has many times raised concerns that Moscow is orchestrating “a hybrid war” against Ukraine Russia denies the allegations.
Ukraine and Russia have been amidst a military conflict since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region has killed 14,000 people.
