In the midst of political tensions with Russia, several Ukrainian government sites have been shut down following a major cyberattack.
While still facing strong tensions with its Russian neighbour, Ukraine is today affected by a major cyberattack: at the start of the weekend, more than seventy government sites have been taken over by hackers. Many of them went offline, while a message in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish stated on the affected sites: “Ukrainians! All your personal data has been uploaded to the public network. All the data on your computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore them”, reports the site Reuters.
Russia in the sights?
On the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but also on that of sports, energy, agrarian policy, the environment, the Public Treasury, or even state emergency services, the message posted by the hackers mentioned in particular “a historic land”, and maps and flag of Ukraine crossed out in red. “Be afraid and expect the worst”, threatened the message. According to the Ukrainian security services at the microphone of CNN, no data would have been affected during this cyberattack. Most of the affected services would have been restored. It remains to identify the perpetrators of the attack.
According to the first information reported by the Ukrainian Ministry of Information, Russia could be behind this digital assault. In a press release, we can read that “This is not the first or even the second time that Ukrainian Internet resources have been attacked since the start of Russian military aggression”.
The government thus considers that the references to the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist parties and to Poland were an attempt to to raise suspicion against their Polish neighbor : “Russia and its proxies have been working for a long time to create the quarrel between two neighboring and friendly countries”. Remember that this is not the first time that Ukraine has been the victim of a cyber attack from Russia. In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Motherland was already suspected of having ordered a major attack on Kiev airport.
While NATO strongly condemned the cyber attack targeting Ukraine, Russia denied being behind the operation, while rejecting the idea of a provocation for a new armed conflict. A few days earlier, however, Moscow had threatened to take military action if his demands were not promptly met. Among them, the non-recognition of Kiev, and the promise of an alliance with NATO.
By: Bitdefender
