Several of Ukraine’s bank and government department websites have crashed.
As Ukrainian cities come under air attack from Russian forces, the country has also suffered the latest blows in an ongoing campaign of cyberattacks. Several of Ukraine’s bank and government department websites crashed on February 23, the BBC reports. The incident follows a similar attack just over a week ago, in which some 70 Ukrainian government websites crashed. Ukraine and the United States squarely blamed Russia. With a full-scale invasion now underway, Ukraine can expect to contend soon with more cyber attacks. These have the potential to cripple infrastructure, affecting water, electricity and telecommunication services – further debilitating Ukraine as it attempts to contend with Russian military aggression. Cyberattacks fall under the traditional attack categories of sabotage, espionage and subversion. They can be carried out more rapidly than standard weapon attacks, and largely remove barriers of time and distance. Launching them is relatively cheap and simple, but defending against them is increasingly costly and difficult. After Russia’s withdrawal from Georgia in 2008, President Vladimir Putin led an effort to modernise the Russian military and incorporate cyber strategies. State-sanctioned cyber attacks have since been at the forefront of Russia’s warfare strategy. The Russian Main Intelligence Directorate typically orchestrates these attacks. They often involve using customised malware (malicious software) to target the hardware and software underpinning a target nation’s systems and infrastructure. Among the latest attacks on Ukraine was a distributed denial-of-service attack. According to Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, several Ukrainian government and banking websites went offline as a result. Distributed denial-of-service attacks use bots to flood an online service, overwhelming it until it crashes, preventing access for legitimate users.
