Security News > 2022 > January > Multiple Ukrainian government websites hacked and defaced
At least 15 websites belonging to various Ukrainian public institutions were compromised, defaced, and subsequently taken offline.
As a result of a massive cyber attack, the websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other government agencies are temporarily down.
The Ukrainian cyber-police has also posted an announcement where they underline that no personal data was compromised due to these attacks and that the warning messages to visitors were false and only meant to scare citizens.
"In order to prevent the spread of the attack on other resources and localization of the technical problem, the work of other government sites was temporarily suspended," explains the police announcement.
Even though Ukraine is going through extreme tensions with Russia, website defacement acts aren't the typical attack method of a Russian state-sponsored hacking group like GRU. However, researchers theorize that the attacks could have been conducted by the GhostWriter APT hacking group, which has a history of targeting government entities in Poland and Ukraine.
Yesterday, the Ukrainian cyberpolice announced the arrest of five ransomware affiliates responsible for over 50 attacks against companies worldwide.