Security News

"The DDoS attacks against the Ukrainian defense ministry and financial institutions appear to be harassment similar to the previous DDoS attacks seen in January," Rick Holland, CISO at Digital Shadows, said via email. In the past two months, Russian- advanced persistent threats have been tied to an attack on 70 Ukrainian government websites, a wiper targeting government, non-profit and IT organizations, and increased attacks and espionage against military targets.

Unknown attackers have mounted disruptive distributed denial-of-service attacks against several Ukrainian government organizations and state-owned banks on Tuesday. The DDoS attacks' impact on government sites and bank services.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, whose site has been taken down following the attacks, said that its "Website was probably attacked by DDoS: an excessive number of requests per second was recorded." "Starting from the afternoon of February 15, 2022, there is a powerful DDOS attack on a number of information resources of Ukraine," Ukraine's State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection added.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, whose site has been taken down following the attacks, said that its "Website was probably attacked by DDoS: an excessive number of requests per second was recorded. Technical works on restoration of regular functioning are carried out." While the Ukrainian defense ministry site has been knocked out, Oschadbank's website is still accessible although customers cannot log in to their online banking accounts.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday announced sanctions against four current and former Ukrainian government officials for engaging in "Russian government-directed influence activities" in the country, including gathering sensitive information about its critical infrastructure. The agency said the four individuals were involved in different roles as part of a concerted influence campaign to destabilize the nation, while also accusing Russia's national security authority, the Federal Security Service, of recruiting Ukrainians in key positions to create instability.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced today sanctions against Volodymyr Oliynyk, a former Ukrainian official, for collecting and sharing info on critical Ukrainian infrastructure with Russia's Federal Security Service."As in previous Russian incursions into Ukraine, repeated cyber operations against Ukraine's critical infrastructure are part of Russia's hybrid tactics to threaten Ukraine."

US companies should be on the lookout for security nasties from Ukrainian partners following the digital graffiti and malware attack launched against Ukraine by Belarus, the CISA has warned. "If working with Ukrainian organizations, take extra care to monitor, inspect, and isolate traffic from those organizations; closely review access controls for that traffic," added CISA, which also advised reviewing backups and disaster recovery drills.

Cybersecurity teams from Microsoft on Saturday disclosed they identified evidence of a new destructive malware operation targeting government, non-profit, and information technology entities in Ukraine amid brewing geopolitical tensions between the country and Russia. "The malware is disguised as ransomware but, if activated by the attacker, would render the infected computer system inoperable," Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, said, adding the intrusions were aimed at government agencies that provide critical executive branch or emergency response functions.

The government of Ukraine on Sunday formally accused Russia of masterminding the attacks that targeted websites of public institutions and government agencies this past week. "All the evidence points to the fact that Russia is behind the cyber attack," the Ministry of Digital Transformation said in a statement.

No fewer than 70 websites operated by the Ukrainian government went offline on Friday for hours in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack amid heightened tensions with Russia. "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," Oleg Nikolenko, MFA spokesperson, tweeted.