UKRAINE CLAIMS RUSSIA BEHIND RECENT CYBERATTACKS

Sun 16 January 2022:

On Sunday, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation stated that evidence pointed to Russia’s alleged involvement in recent cyberattacks against the country’s official websites.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry announced on Friday that its website, as well as the websites of a number of other government agencies, were down due to a cyberattack.

The attacks have being investigated by the Ukrainian Security Service and the National Police. Russian special forces may have been engaged, according to Ukrainian law enforcement organizations.

“So far, it can be said that all the evidence indicates that Russia is behind the cyberattack,” the ministry said in a statement.

Kyiv believes a hacker group linked to Belarusian intelligence carried out a cyberattack that hit Ukrainian government websites this week and used malware similar to that used by a group tied to Russian intelligence, a senior Ukrainian security official said.

Russia was probably involved but gave no details. Belarus is a close ally of Russia.

The messages left on the Ukrainian websites on Friday were in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. They referred to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, where mass killings were carried out in Nazi German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The episode remains a point of contention between Poland and Ukraine.

The ministry urged Ukrainians not to panic, saying that their personal data is safeguarded by the government.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN that Russia “had nothing to do” with the incident and that such claims were groundless. He added that Moscow is “nearly accustomed to the fact that Ukrainians are blaming everything on Russia, even their bad weather”.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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