Ukraine banking and defense platforms knocked out amid heightened tensions with Russia

NetBlocks metrics confirm the loss of service to multiple banking and online platforms in Ukraine, in a manner consistent with a denial of service attack. The incident comes amid heightened tensions with neighboring Russia.

Metrics indicate impact beginning from Tuesday afternoon intensifying in severity over the course of the day. Some service was restored by the evening. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence also corroborated the attack, publishing a statement that it had likely been targeted by a denial-of-service attack. The impacted services had largely returned by Wednesday morning.

On Friday 18 February 2022, the U.S. White House attributed the spate of cyberattacks to the GRU, Russia’s largest foreign-intelligence agency.

What’s happening in Ukraine?

The disruptions to banking and defense platforms on Ukraine comes amid sky-high tensions with Russia, which has been amassing troops on its border, sparking concerns of a potential imminent invasion. Cyberattacks have already played a role in the political conflict, and analysts believe it’s possible that the nation are engaged in hybrid warfare, spilling out into civilian and state technology platforms.

There is no direct attribution to Russia or any other state or non-state actor at the present time. Work is ongoing to assess the incident.

Further reading:


Methodology

NetBlocks diffscans, which map the IP address space of a country in real time, show internet connectivity levels and corresponding outages. Purposeful internet outages may have a distinct network pattern used by NetBlocks to determine and attribute the root cause of an outage, a process known as attribution which follows detection and classification stages.


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