A war is being waged on the streets of Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine, but there is also a silent but just as damaging war being fought: cyber warfare.
Last Wednesday several cyber attacks on Ukrainian government institutions were reported, as well as the media and web pages. Russia has also not been free from cyberattacks since the invasion of Ukraine began.
Today it became known that the hackers who attacked Ukraine managed to destroy the data of the Ministry of the Interior from that country using malicious software.
Advertising
It is not clear if the attacks come geographically from Russia, or if the government of this country is directly behind them, although the probability is high given the nature of the conflict.
According a Bloomberg reportwhich cites 3 sources with knowledge of the attack, and who asked to remain anonymous, a large amount of data from the Ministry of the Interior would have been deleted.
This government entity is responsible for supervising the national police agencies and for carrying out other security tasks in the territory.
So the attackers they could have done intelligence workspying on data relevant to Ukraine’s security strategy, then deleting it entirely, according to one of the sources.
Likewise, the three sources agree that weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the attackers would have been deleting data from the Ukrainian telecommunications network and activating other malware.
The extent of the damage is still unknown, but the necessary investigations are already being carried out. The government has not offered comment on the matter.
On the other hand, the operators of the Conti ransomware issued a statement showing support for the Russian government, which could pose a serious threat to Ukraine and also to any actor lobbying against Russia, they said.
Ukraine prepares its cyber defense against Russia
However, Ukraine is not alone, and the response from allied hackers has been swift. Last Thursday, a hacker secretly working with the Ukrainian government claimed that are looking for volunteers to protect their infrastructure communications and computing, according to the Reuters agency.
The hacker in question is Yegor Aushev, who runs a cybersecurity company, and who said that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry had appointed him as a recruiter of specialists to launch a cyber campaign to defend against and cyberattack Russia.
also this week the famous collective Anonymous declared cyber war on Russia. So far no attacks from this group have been reported, but they are to be expected.
