Recent DDoS attack was largest in Ukrainian history, says Ukrainian digital transformation minister
A recent DDoS attack on Ukrainian banks and government websites was the biggest in the history of Ukraine and was aimed at destabilizing the country, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said at a briefing on Feb. 16.
“Yesterday, Feb. 15, the largest DDoS attack in the history of Ukraine affected government websites, the banking sector…,” he said.
“This attack is unprecedented. It is clear that it was prepared in advance and was aimed at destabilization, sowing panic, as well as doing everything to foment chaos in Ukrainian actions.”
Fedorov added that the attackers had failed and the banking system recovered very quickly.
“Such cyber-attacks costs millions of dollars. The attack vectors were organized from different countries. The most important thing is that we were ready for it,” the minister said.
Viktor Zhora, deputy chairman of the State Special Communications Service for digital development, digital transformation and digitization, in turn announced that many resources were forcibly turned off yesterday to prevent the spread of the attack.
“Now the situation is completely under control. The attack is continuing,” he stated.
“The average attack power, which is recorded by the service’s system of secure access to the Internet, reaches tens of megabits per second. We’ve pinpointed a combination of methods (being used), that is, a whole host of attack technologies on web services.”
On Feb. 15, almost Ukrainian banks, as well as the websites of the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, were subject to a massive DDoS attack.
A DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attack, works by overloading a target server’s bandwidth capacity with irrelevant requests from multiple other machines, causing the affected service to experience delays or cease function entirely.
Most bank services have since been restored, but users report intermittent outages nonetheless.
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