Russia has been using cyberattacks for years in its conflict with Ukraine, but the neighboring country’s invasion has now sparked an unprecedented backlash among Ukrainian hackers and sympathizers from abroad.
The largest Internet attack against Ukraine occurred in 2017, when the computer systems of the Kiev metro, Ukrainian ports, companies in the energy sector and various strategic agencies of the Ukrainian government were paralyzed.
The attack occurred through “the accounting software used by institutions and many companies in Ukraine,” says Bogdan Botezatu in Bucharest, an expert at Bitdefender, a Romanian cybersecurity company that in 2017 was the first to sound the alarm after his clients were affected.
During office hours
The emails with which the virus was injected were sent at hours that coincide with the usual working day in the Moscow time zone, which suggests that they were sent from Russian public institutions.
“There are many countries in this time zone, but how many others have the cyber capacity to create such a sophisticated threat?” Botezatu explains about what is considered the largest cyber attack in history.
More attacks before the invasion
A day before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Kiev again suffered a large-scale attack that disabled bank systems and government websites.
That attack was of the DDoS type, or denial of service, which consists of hackers taking control of computer systems connected to devices such as surveillance cameras, lighting systems or even remote-controlled vacuum cleaners.
From these systems, they simultaneously launch an avalanche of requests to connect these devices to the victim’s computer, so that their system cannot cope with the demand and collapses.
Hacktivism at the service of the Kremlin
An organized cybercrime group that demands ransoms for the computers it blocks has made itself available to the Kremlin to help Russia’s war effort on the Internet front, Botezatu recalls.
Known as Conti, the group enjoys impunity in Russia and pro-Russian states in exchange for not attacking users within the Russian sphere of influence, whom they identify by IP location or the use of Cyrillic keyboards.
“In general, the big ransomware (data kidnapping) operators are in the ex-Soviet space, because the arm of Europol or Interpol does not reach there,” explains the Bitdefender expert.
Reaction in favor of Ukraine
On February 24, the hacking collective Anonymous declared on its Twitter “cyber war against the Russian government”. Since then, Anonymous has claimed DDoS-type attacks against Russian media and institutions.
Another of his actions consisted of “hacking” Russian public television channels to insert images of the war censored by the Kremlin and to broadcast Ukrainian patriotic songs. Anonymous has also intercepted and disseminated communications from the Russian Army.
Instructions have also been published online for people in solidarity with Ukraine to make their computer systems available to a group of “hackers”, so that they can carry out DDoS attacks against Russia.
In Ukraine, an entire army of volunteer “hackers” has been established to defend the country’s computer systems and attack the Russians, while a Ukrainian member of Conti has leaked the conversations held within the group for 13 months.
EU support
The European Union (EU) has also created a rapid cyber response team made up of Lithuanians, Croatians, Poles, Estonians, Romanians and the Dutch to help Ukraine.
From Romania, Bitdefender has started offering free assistance to Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries in case of Russian attacks.
“We can expect these threats to extend to NATO countries as well,” Botezatu warns.
During the communist era, the Soviet Union and its European satellites specialized in stealing and reverse engineering cyber products developed in the West.
This has made Russia, Ukraine, and several post-communist NATO countries in central and eastern Europe fertile ground for cyber warfare virtuosos, both inside and outside legal frameworks.
Source: Gestion
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