Cyberattacks increased on Ukraine by the Russian side
Ukraine’s parliament, as well as other government and banking websites, were targeted by another wave of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wednesday, according to cybersecurity researchers, who also claimed that unidentified attackers infected hundreds of computers with destructive malware.
Officials have long predicted that cyber-attacks will precede and accompany any Russian military incursion, and analysts say the incidents follow a nearly two-decade-old Russian playbook of combining cyber operations with real-world aggression.
ESET Research Labs reported Wednesday that it discovered a new data-wiping piece of malware in Ukraine on “hundreds of machines throughout the country.” However, it was unclear how many networks were affected.
“With regard to whether the malware was successful in its wiping capability, we assume that this was the case and affected machines were wiped,” ESET research chief Jean-Ian Boutin told The Associated Press in response to questions.
Boutin refused to name the targets “to protect the victims,” but he did say that “these were large organisations that were affected,” and that while ESET cannot say who was responsible, “the attack appears to be related to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.”
According to Vikram Thakur, technical director at Symantec Threat Intelligence, the wiper malware infected three organisations: Ukrainian government contractors in Latvia and Lithuania, as well as a Ukrainian financial institution.
Cyberattacks have been a key tool of Russian aggression in Ukraine since before 2014, when the Kremlin annexed Crimea. Distributed-denial-of-service attacks are among the least impactful because they don’t entail network intrusion. Such attacks barrage websites with junk traffic so they become unreachable. They were also used against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008.
When asked about the ESET discovery, senior Ukrainian cyber defence official Victor Zhora said, “No comments.” Boutin said the malware’s timestamp indicates it was created in late December and that it has only been seen in Ukraine.C
