Ukraine hit by more cyberattacks, destructive malware amid war with Russia

Ukraines Parliament and other government and banking websites were hit with another punishing wave of distributeddenialofservice attacks and cybersecurity researchers said unidentified attackers had also infected hundreds of computers with destructive malwareSome of the infected computers were in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania the researchers saidEarly Thursday local time in Ukraine as fears of a Russian invasion heightened the foreign ministry and council of ministers were unreachable and other sites were slow to load suggesting the DDoS attacks were continuing though there was no official confirmationOfficials have long expected cyber attacks to precede and accompany any Russian military incursion and analysts said the activity hewed to Russias playbook of wedding cyber operations with realworld aggressionESET Research Labs said it detected a previously unseen piece of datawiping malware Wednesday on ldquohundreds of machines in the countryrdquo It was not clear how many networks were affectedWith regards whether the malware was successful in its wiping capability we assume that this indeed was the case and affected machines were wipedrdquo said ESET research chief JeanIan Boutin He would not name the targets but said they were ldquolarge organizationsrdquo ESET was unable to say who was responsibleSymantec Threat Intelligence detected three organizations hit by the wiper malware iquest Ukrainian government contractors in Latvia and Lithuania and a financial institution in Ukraine said Vikram Thakur its technical director Both countries are NATO membersThe attackers have gone after these targets without much caring for where they may be physically locatedrdquo he saidAll three targets had ldquoclose affiliation with the government of Ukrainerdquo said Thakur saying Symantec believed the attacks were ldquohighly targetedrdquo He said roughly 50 computers at the financial outfit were impacted some with data wipedAsked about the wiper attack senior Ukrainian cyber defense official Victor Zhora had no commentBoutin said the malwares timestamp indicated it was created in late DecemberldquoRussia likely has been planning this for months so it is hard to say how many organizations or agencies have been backdoored in preparation for these attacksrdquo said Chester Wisniewski principal research scientist at the cybersecurity firm SophosHe guessed the Kremlin intended with the malware to ldquosend the message that they have compromised a significant amount of Ukrainian infrastructure and these are just little morsels to show how ubiquitous their penetration isrdquoWord of the wiper follows a midJanuary attack that Ukrainian officials blamed on Russia in which the defacement of some 70 government websites was used to mask intrusions into government networks in which at least two servers were damaged with wiper malware masquerading as ransomwareThakur said it was too early to say if the malware attack discovered Wednesday was as serious as the variety that damaged servers in JanuaryCyberattacks have been a key tool of Russian aggression in Ukraine since before 2014 when the Kremlin annexed Crimea and hackers tried to thwart elections They were also used against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008Distributeddenialofservice attacks are among the least impactful because they dont entail network intrusion Such attacks barrage websites with junk traffic so they become unreachableThe DDoS targets Wednesday included the defense and foreign ministries the Council of Ministers and Privatbank the countrys largest commercial bank Many of the same sites were similarly knocked offline Feb 1314 in DDoS attacks that the US and UK governments quickly blamed on Russias GRU military intelligence agencyWednesdays DDoS attacks appeared less impactful than the earlier onslaught with targeted sites soon reachable again as emergency responders blunted them Zhoras office Ukraines information protection agency said responders switched to a different DDoS protection service providerDoug Madory director of internet analysis at the network management firm Kentik Inc recorded two attack waves each lasting more than an hourA spokesman for Californiabased Cloudflare which provides services to some of the targeted sites said DDoS attacks in Ukraine have been sporadic and on the rise in the past month but ldquorelatively modest compared to large DDoS attacks weve handled in the pastrdquoThe West blames Russias GRU for some of the most damaging cyberattacks on record including a pair in 2015 and 2016 that briefly knocked out parts of Ukraines power grid and the NotPetya ldquowiperrdquo virus of 2017 which caused more than 10 billion of damage globally by infecting companies that do business in Ukraine with malware seeded through a tax preparation software updateThe wiper malware detected in Ukraine this year has so far been manually activated as opposed to a worm like NotPetya which can spread out of control across bordersThis story has been 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