Security News > 2022 > March > Ukrainian sites saw a 10x increase in attacks when invasion started
Internet security companies have recorded a massive wave of attacks against Ukrainian WordPress sites since Russia invaded Ukraine, aiming to take down the websites and cause general demoralization.
Cybersecurity firm Wordfence, which protects 8,320 WordPress websites belonging to universities, government, military, and law enforcement entities in Ukraine, reports having recorded 144,000 attacks on February 25 alone.
The focus of the attacks appears to be a subset of 376 academic websites that received 209,624 attacks between February 25 and 27.
This massive wave of coordinated attacks has resulted in the compromise of 30 Ukrainian university websites, which mostly suffered complete defacement and service unavailability.
The hacking group behind these attacks is a pro-Russian group called "TheMx0nday," who have posted evidence of the hacks on defacement aggregator Zone-H. Wordfence has found that the threat actors are based in Brazil but routed their attacks via Finish IP addresses using the anonymous internet service provider Njalla.
"We are activating this live security feed for UA websites automatically until further notice. Within the next few hours, over 8,000 Ukrainian websites running the free version of Wordfence will automatically become far more secure against attacks, like these, that are targeting them."