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Ukraine Defence Ministry Website, Banks, Knocked Offline
Published by maria gbaf
Posted on February 16, 2022
2 min readLast updated: February 9, 2026
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Published by maria gbaf
Posted on February 16, 2022
2 min readLast updated: February 9, 2026
Add as preferred source on GoogleKYIV (Reuters) – The online networks of Ukraine’s defence ministry and two banks were overwhelmed on Tuesday and Ukraine’s information security centre pointed the finger at neighbouring Russia.
KYIV (Reuters) – The online networks of Ukraine’s defence ministry and two banks were overwhelmed on Tuesday and Ukraine’s information security centre pointed the finger at neighbouring Russia.
“It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of little dirty tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale,” the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which is part of the culture ministry, said in a statement.
Kyiv has blamed Moscow for similar actions in the past and since Russia began massing more than 100,000 troops near the frontier, raising East-West tensions as the West fears Russia is planning to attack Ukraine, which Moscow denies.
The type of disruption reported by Ukrainian authorities on Tuesday is known as a distributed denial-of-service – often abbreviated DDoS – but the scale of it wasn’t immediately clear. The manoeuvre, which works by directing a fire hose of internet traffic from a multitude of sources against one set of servers or another, is a common across the internet and such attacks happen periodically in Ukraine and beyond.
A message on the home page of the Ukrainian defence ministry website said it was under maintenance. The ministry tweeted that its website was apparently under a cyberattack and it was working on restoring the access to it.
Oshadbank confirmed the cyberattack saying that it resulted in slowing down of some of its systems. The strategic communications centre said that Privatbank users also had problems with payments and a banking app. Privatbank did not immediately comment.
San Francisco-based Cloudflare, a prominent provider of denial-of-service protection, said that it had seen no evidence of “large DDoS activity” in Ukraine against its data centres or customers there.
“From our perspective today hasn’t seen unusual attack traffic against us or our customers on Ukraine,” the company said in an email.
The United States and its allies have indicated that they are prepared to respond to Russian digital incursions, even if details remain sparse.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said there were “a range of means that we could respond – both seen and unseen – to a cyber attack or any other attack.”
(Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Raphael Satter; writing by Maria Tsvetkova and Raphael Satter; Editing by Peter Graff and Grant McCool)
A cyberattack is an attempt to damage, disrupt, or gain unauthorized access to computer systems, networks, or devices. It can involve various tactics, including malware, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic from multiple sources.
Information security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating risks related to unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction of data.
Digital currencies are forms of currency that exist only in digital form and are not tangible like physical money. They can be used for online transactions and include cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
A financial institution is an organization that provides financial services, such as banking, investment, insurance, and asset management, to individuals and businesses.
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