Ukraine banks and government sites hit by DDoS described as largest-ever attack in the country’s history

A DDoS attack suffered on February 15 by several Ukrainian banks and government resources has been described as the largest in the country’s history. This was stated by the head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, at a briefing, devoted to the incident.

Deputy head of the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection on digital development, transformations and digitisation Viktor Zhora said the attack continues, but specialists are successfully coping with it.

According to Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine Serhiy Demedyuk, financial losses from the incident have not been recorded. There is also no confirmation of any data breaches.

He noted that much of the disruption to websites was due to the extra load on resources from citizens themselves, who, in the wake of the news, began to flood banking apps and other attacked resources.

CERT-UA’s incident response team promptly logged reports of the attacks and disabled several government sites to counter the spread of damage from the hackers’ actions — they were not functioning precisely because of this, Zhora said.

The head of the National Bank’s security department, Ihor Konovalov, said that the systems of PrivatBank and Oschadbank are currently operating normally, despite the ongoing attack.

Experts detected a trace of foreign intelligence services.

“The cost of such an attack amounts to millions of dollars: an individual hacker or a group cannot afford to spend such money. Such attacks are carried out by states through intelligence services or specially created infrastructure,” said Ilya Vityuk, head of the Cybersecurity Department of the SBU.

On 15 February, Ukrainian banks and state websites were subjected to a DDoS-attack. Disruptions were also observed at the Diia portal. The National Policeopened a criminal case.

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