Ukraine Hit with Massive Cyber Attacks Days After Invasion
While the Russian aggression in Ukraine has long been a predictable folly of Vladimir Putin, the brazen nature of the conflict is still providing a bit of shock for international observers.
Putin’s first order of business was to provide himself with some sort of excuse to get Russian troops into Ukraine, which he did by signing an internationally-condemned treaty recognizing two new, imaginary breakaway states in the eastern portion of the nation. Â Then, under the auspices of “peacekeeping”, the Kremlin ordered tanks, artillery, and troops into these phony “statelings”.
Now, as Ukraine begins to call up military reservists and evacuate their citizens from Russia, the tiny, resource-heavy nation is dealing with a massive cyber attack.
The websites of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet of Ministers, and Rada — or Parliament — were all experiencing outages as of 5 p.m. local time in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a Telegram post that the outages were caused by a DDOS attack, according to NPR correspondent Jenna McLaughlin.
Cyber attacks have long been a staple of Russian aggression, and are often shrouded from suggestions of state-sponsorship by the use of “rogue” cyber actors.
This is the second time in as many weeks that Ukraine’s government sites have been attacked, and the timing of this latest digital intrusion certainly doesn’t appear to be a coincidence.