We’re not sure if you’ve heard, but there are some awfully interesting times going on in Ukraine at the moment. And those times aren’t confined to American and Russian troops preparing to cause damage to neither of those countries. Websites in the world’s newest geopolitical hotspot are taking strain, thanks to ongoing DDoS attacks.
Monitoring company NetBlocks reported on Twitter that several Ukrainian government websites “…have just been impacted by network disruptions; the incident appears consistent with recent DDOS attacks”.
DDoS – FORMAT c:/Ukraine/V:USSR
The DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks began yesterday, escalating before tapering off. A NetBlocks researcher, speaking to BBC News, said, “Ukraine’s military and banking websites have seen a more rapid recovery after today’s cyber-attack, likely due to preparedness and increased capacity to implement mitigations.”
The reason for the improved recovery time? That’d be other attacks launched against the country last week. These involved more than 70 government websites being taken down, as well as threatening messages being posted. These Polish-language messages told Ukrainians to “prepare for the worst”, but were apparently not written by a native polish speaker.
Last week’s attacks were blamed on Russia by everyone from the USA to NATO to the Polish and Ukrainian governments. This week’s DDoS targeting the country hasn’t officially been blamed on anyone (so far). Russia denied involvement with Ukraine’s previous attacks but the pattern is consistent with previous Russian military action. Simultaneous DDoS outages occurred when Russia entered Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014.
Source: Netblocks (Twitter) via BBC
