Ukraine's parliament and other government and banking websites were hit with another wave of distributed-denial-of-service attacks Wednesday, and cybersecurity researchers said unidentified attackers had also infected hundreds of computers with destructive malware. Officials have long said they expect cyber attacks to precede and accompany any Russian military incursion, and analysts said the incidents hew to a nearly two-decade-old Russian playbook of wedding cyber operations with real-world aggression.
The wiper attacks also follow a third "massive" wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit several Ukrainian government and banking institutions on Wednesday, knocking out online portals for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet of Ministers, and Rada, the country's parliament.
Last week, two of the largest Ukrainian banks, PrivatBank and Oschadbank, as well as the websites of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces suffered outages as a result of a DDoS attack from unknown actors, prompting the U.K. and U.S. governments to point the fingers at the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), an allegation the Kremlin has denied.
Wednesday's DDoS attacks appeared less impactful than the earlier onslaught with targeted sites soon reachable again as emergency responders blunted them. Zhora's office, Ukraine's information protection agency, said responders switched to a different DDoS protection service provider.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at the network management firm Kentik Inc., recorded two attack waves each lasting more than an hour. A spokesman for California-based Cloudflare, which provides services to some of the targeted sites, said DDoS attacks in Ukraine have been sporadic and on the rise in the past month but relatively modest compared to large DDoS attacks we've handled in the past.
If Russia conducts future cyberattacks in Ukraine, President Joe Biden stated last month that the US could respond with its own cyberoperations. The destructive data-wiping tool known as "wiper" malware, however, had the potential to be the most damaging of all the cyber disasters. According to cybersecurity firm ESET, which has many clients in Ukraine, the malicious code infected "major organisations" in the nation, according to the report.
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