RUSSIAN BLUFF: Cyber Attack Hits Ukraine Bank and Ministry of Defense
There really is no telling what Vladimir Putin is up to. The former KGB man-turned-Russian President is no stranger to large-scale long-cons and obvious obfuscation, and the actions being taken in and around Ukraine at the moment are just further proof of that.
Earlier on Tuesday, Russian military leaders suggested that they were beginning to remove troops from the border with Ukraine, (although independent observers have had a hard time verifying this).
But then came an attack on Ukraine that bears the indelible signature of Russian aggression.
Ukrainian defense ministry websites went down Tuesday due to what the government claimed was a massive cyberattack, as Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a tweet Tuesday that the websites were down, and that it was likely being targeted by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. A separate Ukrainian agency, the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, said the website of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had also been attacked.
The agency also said Ukrainian banks PrivatBank and Oschadbank had been targeted by the DDoS attack. The Ukrainian Cyberpolice said in a tweet that it had evidence that unidentified individuals were sending out text messages about fraudulent Ukrainian ATM failures.
Russia’s fondness for engaging in cyber warfare had many international observers concerned that this was the first volley of attacks in a new “hybrid war” between the two nations.
As of this writing, there has been no official evidence presented to definitively tie the attack to Russia.
