Two of the largest Ukrainian banks as well as the websites of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces are suffering a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack Tuesday from currently unknown attackers, according to the country’s Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security and the Ministry of Defense.
“The official web portal of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine suffered, probably, DDoS-attack,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense posted on Facebook and Twitter. “Scheduled technical works are currently underway to restore the website.”
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As of the time of this writing, the military’s website was still down.
The government’s Center for Strategic Communications also posted that Privatbank, one of Ukraine’s largest banks, “has been under a massive DDoS attack. Privat24 users report problems with payments and the application in general. Some users cannot manage to log into Privat24 at all, others do not display the balance and recent transactions.” The government stated that “there is no threat to depositors’ funds” and that the attack was focused on the bank’s Privat24 online banking application. Without saying there was an attack, the government also posted that Oschadbank, Ukraine’s other massive state-run bank, “also has failures, and Internet banking is down.”
All of this comes against the backdrop of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tuesday morning, Russia claimed that it was pulling some troops from the Ukrainian border, but the situation remains unstable.
In general, DDoS attacks are unsophisticated but can also be pretty effective. By flooding a target website with bogus traffic, they can temporarily take down web services or websites until certain protections can be put in place. There is currently no indication that Russia or anyone connected to Russia is behind these attacks, but they do throw more uncertainty into a tense and volatile situation.
