Ukraine authorities confirmed a cyberattack took place on Tuesday, taking down most government websites, including the defense ministry, armed forces, and two of the largest state banks in the country. Amid rising tensions between the state and Russia who, has placed over 100,000 troops along its border, the network outage has caused another block for any hope of de-escalation as Ukrainian authorities alleged Russia was the perpetrator.
“It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of little dirty tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale,” the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which is part of the culture ministry, said in a statement.
It isn’t the first time Ukraine faced a cyber-attack this year. A similar incident occurred last month, but authorities did not detail who could be responsible and only announced that the damage was limited.
Russian authorities on Wednesday responded to the allegations by denying any part in it.
“We do not know anything. As expected, Ukraine continues blaming Russia for everything,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. He also added that Russia has nothing to do with any DDoS attacks, which were identified as the specific type of cyber-attack that hit the Ukrainian websites.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are caused by flooding websites with large amounts of internet traffic in order to disrupt their operation or take them offline. This type of hacking technique is generally deemed harmless as they do not have aftereffects beyond website outages;
the real problem is finding the perpetrators of DDoS attacks because it can be challenging to trace them as they can camouflage their location.
The affected websites included the Defense ministry, foreign ministry, Armed forces, Culture ministry, PrivatBank, and Oscadbank. Several users reported that they were unable to access their financial details, including transactions and banking apps. With PrivatBank, users couldn’t access the bank’s app, and some couldn’t see their balances or recent transactions. Users of the Sberbank app also reported problems accessing their details, and many Ukrainian citizens also received spam text messages that ATMs were down. It’s unclear how many people received the texts or if the cyber-attack also took down any Ukrainian ATMs.
The Ukrainian Information Ministry’s State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection said that “There is no threat to depositors’ funds,” after panic ensued among customers. Officials later said that the websites of both the banks had been restored by late evening on Tuesday, and operations had resumed. However, access to the websites of the defense ministry and armed forces wasn’t regained until yesterday.
The United States and its other allies have expressed that they are prepared to retaliate on behalf of the country even though there was no confirmation on who was responsible. U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters that they were coordinating with NATO allies and other partners to expand their defenses on the cyber front.
Edited by- Subbuthai Padma
Published by- Radhika N
