Ukraine Blames Russia For A Cyber Attack That Hit Its Defense Ministry, Armed Forces And Two States Bank

On Tuesday, Ukraine said that the country’s Defense Ministry and Armed Forces websites, as well as two state banks, suffered a cyberattack that could have been from Russia. The country’s communications fears that the attack is from Russian forces conducting military drills on its borders.

Oschadbank state savings bank and Privat, which are two of Russia’s biggest financial institutions, were also affected by the cyber attack.

Following the hack, the defence ministry website kept displaying an error message that the site was ‘undergoing technical maintenance”. The Armed Forces site, on the other hand, was inaccessible while the online services of two affected state banks were down.

Privat and its app called Privat24 were hit by a “massive denial of service (DDOS) attack”, the country’s watchdog said adding that “It cannot be excluded that the aggressor is resorting to dirty tricks” while referring to Russia.

The attack happened about a month after another cyberattack that took down the websites of core government bodies. The government took the attack seriously. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced a cyber warfare cooperation deal with Kyiv within hours of the attack. These deals were made with the aim of helping to protect Ukraine from Russian state actors and private proxies committing cybercrimes on the Kremlin’s behalf. Kyiv said the damage in January had been limited and refused to place blames. The European Union too said it was going to deploy all its resources to help the country.

The unexpected attack suffered by Ukraine today came just as Russia announced that it was pulling back some of its troops deployed on Ukraine deployed on Ukraine’s borders in Moscow’s standoff with the West over NATO’s presence in eastern Europe.

In other news, Russia’s Finance Minister recently suggested that banks should be allowed to sell cryptocurrency as the country continues to debate its stance on cryptocurrencies.