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February 24,2022

Andrew Campbell 

Ukrainian’s major official websites were unreachable due to multiple cyberattacks. During the chaos of cyberattacks, Ukraine was confronted with the fact that Russia launched a military invasion into its separatist regions.

Official websites, including those of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Education, and others, malfunctioned. Head of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, stated that distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) was the key reason to disruptions of websites. Besides officials’ websites, some banks and business organizations were under attack. Impacted areas extended to Latvia and Lithuania.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are designed to crash a website by flooding it with huge amounts of requests and make others unable to access it.

Ukraine has experienced cyberattacks for a long time. This was the third wave of targeting Ukraine by DDoS in this year. In addition to DDoS attacks, experts of cyber-security at ESET and Symantec reported that they had detected a second form of attack on computer systems by a wiper malware. 

Sources of attacks have not been confirmed yet. At this critical moment, Russia was a major suspect to launch this cyberattack. Russia denied this action to disrupt websites in Ukraine. Four government websites were hacked, and at least one Ukrainian financial institution was taken offline as a result of the attack. According to the report of Cyber Police in Ukraine, ATMs did not work from residents’ text messages. 

The US will continue to monitor cyberattacks and provide assistance to Ukraine in order to safeguard cyber-security.