UK, US officials say Russia was behind DDoS attacks against Ukraine

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UK and US officials have blamed Russia’s intelligence company for carrying out past week’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in opposition to Ukraine.

The attacks, which took area on 15 February, targeted the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, as properly as Ukraine’s largest business bank, PrivatBank, and the Condition Discounts Lender of Ukraine, Oschadbank.

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On Friday, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) mentioned that complex information from the attacks demonstrate that Russia’s Most important Intelligence Directorate (GRU) was responsible for the attacks towards the two Ukrainian banking institutions.

In a assertion, the UK’s International, Commonwealth & Growth Office (FCDO) described GRU’s exercise as “yet another instance of Russia’s aggressive acts in opposition to Ukraine”.

“This disruptive conduct is unacceptable, Russia should stop this exercise and respect Ukrainian sovereignty. We are steadfast in our help for Ukraine in the experience of Russian aggression,” the FCDO spokesperson included.

In a White House press briefing on Friday, deputy nationwide security advisor Anne Neuberger also explained that the Russian government was liable for “the huge-scale cyber attacks on Ukrainian banking companies”

“​​Russia likes to transfer in the shadows and counts on a prolonged approach of attribution so it can go on its destructive behaviour towards Ukraine in cyberspace, such as pre-positioning for its potential invasion.

“Known GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting substantial volumes of communications to Ukraine-primarily based IP addresses and domains,” Neuberger explained, incorporating that the US is functioning to assistance Ukrainian network defenders to “respond to and recover from cyber incidents as well as reinforce the resilience of cyber critical infrastructure”, as very well as “cooperating with Allies and partners to disrupt and reply to malicious cyber activity”.

“That features operate to share intelligence regarding malicious cyber techniques and make sure the worldwide neighborhood is completely ready to promptly contact out malicious cyber action as appropriate,” she explained.

On Saturday, the Russian Embassy in the US denied the accusations and explained Neuberger’s statement as “purely anti-Russian”.

“We categorically reject these baseless statements of the administration and notice that Russia has nothing to do with the described functions and in basic principle has never ever done and does not conduct any “destructive” operations in cyberspace,” the embassy said in a Twitter article.