The Ukrainian government formally accused Russia of being behind all the past week’s cyberattacks on the government agencies and public institutions’ targeted websites.
According to the Digital Transformation Ministry’s statement:
“All the evidence points to the fact that Russia is behind the cyberattack,”
“Moscow continues to wage a hybrid war and is actively building forces in the information and cyberspace.”
As per the Ministry, the objective of the cyberattack isn’t just to make people intimidated, but also to “destabilize the situation in Ukraine by stopping the work of the public sector and undermining the confidence in the government on the part of Ukrainians.”
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. Our specialists have already started restoring the work of IT systems, and the cyberpolice has opened an investigation.
— Oleg Nikolenko (@OlegNikolenko_) January 14, 2022
Responding to the accusations, Russia has clearly denied being involved in the attacks. CNN was informed by the press secretary of President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, that:
“We have nothing to do with it, and Russia has nothing to do with these cyberattacks,”
“We are nearly accustomed to the fact that Ukrainians are blaming everything on Russia, even their bad weather.”
The disclosure of the cyberattacks came in when various Ukrainian government sites were vandalized with a message threatening people to “be afraid and expect the worst” and alleging that their private information is now hacked.
As per the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), the cyberattacks were believed to be carried out after a few malicious actors attained access to a private organization’s infrastructure that had the rights to a few of these websites affected.
Microsoft also warned about malware being used against multiple Ukrainian companies that’s disguised as ransomware but actually wipes all data. This malware, now being called as WhisperGate, has been attributed to a threat cluster with a tracking ID of DEV-0586.
The year has just begun, and cyberattacks are already being reported all over the world. Recently, Portugal’s biggest media company got hit by a ransomware attack. Right before that, the FBI alerted that ransomware-infected USBs were being sent to companies by the FIN7 hacking group to attack them.
