Ukraine’s defense ministry, banks, and military websites went offline after cyberattack

Europe, News February 16, 2022 , by IRIA No Comments

A severe cyberattack hit the Ukraine defense ministry and armed forces websites as well as two banks on February 15, 7:00 PM (local time), according to the sources of Ukrainian government agencies.

The Deputy Chairman at State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) Victor Zhora informed the press agencies about the nature of the cyber attack however he also stated that it is yet not clear who is behind the cyberattacks because it is too early to attribute the responsibility.

The cyberattack comes at a crucial time in Ukraine when Russia has massed an estimated 100,000 strong military buildup at the eastern border of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government agency has identified the attack as Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack. DDoS floods a website with phony traffic causing disruption in its operations. The Website of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and Ukraine’s military along with the websites of two commercial banks, PrivatBank and Oschadbank, were attacked and restored shortly after. However, some users are still reporting to face difficulty in accessing the websites.

The Ukrainian government agencies have reported that they are keeping close monitoring on the IP addresses accessing the Ukrainian governments and banks’ websites in order avoid any malicious activities.

Although DDoS attacks are one of the cheapest and easiest ones to carry out in order to jam a website with unprecedented traffic, it is really hard to trace and figure out the source of the attack because the IP addresses are usually spoofed as different locations than the location of the attack.

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A similar cyberattack was carried out against several Ukrainian government websites in January 2022. The targeted websites were displayed with a text that read, “be afraid and wait for the worst”.

Ukraine’s government agency reported that as many as 70 different government websites were attacked during the previous cyberattack. Ukrainian Information Ministry accused Russia of carrying out the attacks by stating, “This is not the first time or even the second time that Ukrainian Internet resources have been attacked since the beginning of the Russian military aggression.” The Ukrainian Information Ministry is yet to give any statement about the recent cyberattack.