A series of cyberattacks on Tuesday knocked the websites of the Ukrainian army, the defense ministry and major banks offline, Ukrainian authorities said, as tensions persisted over the threat of a possible Russian invasion.
Still, there was no indication the relatively low-level,
distributed-denial-of-service attacks might be a smokescreen for more serious
and damaging cyber mischief.
At least 10 Ukrainian websites were unreachable due to the
attacks, including the defense, foreign, and culture ministries and Ukraine's
two largest state banks. In such attacks, websites are barraged with a flood of
junk data packets, rendering them unreachable.
“We don't have any information of other disruptive actions
that (could) be hidden by this DDoS attack,” said Victor Zhora, a top Ukrainian
cyberdefense official. He said emergency response teams were working to cut off
the attackers and recover services.
Customers at Ukraine's largest state-owned bank, Privatbank,
and the state-owned Sberbank reported problems with online payments and the
banks' apps.
Among the attackers' targets was the hosting provider for
Ukraine's army and Privatbank, said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis
at the network management firm Kentik Inc.
“There is no threat to depositors' funds," Zhora's
agency, the Ukrainian Information Ministry's Center for Strategic
Communications and Information Security, said in a statement. Nor did the
attack affect the communications of Ukraine's military forces, said Zhora.
It was too early to say who was behind the attack, he added.
The ministry statement suggested Russian involvement: “It is
possible that the aggressor resorted to tactics of petty mischief, because his
aggressive plans aren't working overall,” the Ukrainian statement said.
Quick attribution in cyberattacks is typically difficult, as
aggressors often try to hide their tracks.
“We need to analyse logs from IT providers,” Zhora said
Oleh Derevianko, a leading private-sector expert and founder
of the ISSP cybersecurity firm, said Ukrainians are always worried that such
“noisy” cyberattacks could be masking something more sinister.
Escalating fears about a Russian invasion of Ukraine eased
slightly as Russia sent signals Tuesday that it might be pulling back from the
brink, but Western powers demanded proof.
The cyber aggression is nevertheless typical of Russian
President Vladimir Putin, who likes to try to keep his adversaries off balance.
“These attacks are ratcheting up attention and pressure,”
said Christian Sorensen, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm SightGain who
previously worked for US Cyber Command. “The purpose at this stage is to
increase leverage in negotiations.”
Ukraine has been subject to a steady diet of Russian
aggression in cyberspace since 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula
and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
On January 14, a cyberattack that damaged servers at
Ukraine's State Emergency Service and at the Motor Transport Insurance Bureau
with a malicious “wiper” cloaked as ransomware. The damage proved minimal —
some cybersecurity experts think that was by design, given the capabilities of
Russian state-backed hackers. A message posted simultaneously on dozens of
defaced Ukrainian government websites said: “Be afraid and expect the worst.”
Serhii Demediuk, the No. 2 official at Ukraine's National
Security and Defense Council, called the January 14 attack “part of a
full-scale Russian operation directed at destabilising the situation in
Ukraine, aimed at exploding our Euro-Atlantic integration and seizing power.”
Such attacks are apt to continue as Putin tries to “degrade”
and “delegitimise” trust in Ukrainian institutions, the cybersecurity firm
CrowdStrike said in a subsequent blog post.
In the winters of 2015 and 2016, attacks on Ukraine's power
grid attributed to Russia's GRU military intelligence agency temporarily
knocked out power.
Russia's GRU has also been blamed for perhaps the most
devastating cyberattack ever. Targeting companies doing business in Ukraine in
2017, the NotPetya virus caused over $10 billion in damage worldwide. The
virus, also disguised as ransomware, was a “wiper” virus that scrubbed entire
networks.
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