Ukrainian state agency reports 70 government sites affected by recent massive phishing attack
About 70 websites belonging to Ukrainian government bodies and ministries came under a massive phishing attack overnight, Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection reported on Jan. 14.
The agency said both regional and national government sites had been affected.
“I would like to note that the personal data of Ukrainians was in no way corrupted as a result of the cyber-attack,” an agency representative said at press briefing on Friday.
“No important data was leaked, the site content was not damaged, (but) some sites have now been forcibly disabled.”
The agency stated that it did not have any indication that any data had been leaked or stolen from state databases.
Currently, the agency is collecting digital evidence and analyzing log files.
“As soon as we make sure that there are no strangers in the system, there is no malicious code and collect all the necessary evidence, the work of these sites will be restored,” reads the report.
This was one of the largest cyber-attacks on government agencies in the past four years, at least in terms of its coverage, the agency stated.
The agency representative noted that the Cyber Security Situation Centre had received the alert about the situation at 0400 a.m.
In late December, the U.S. newspaper The New York Times wrote that Russia was preparing cyber-attacks, targeting the Ukrainian electric grid and government capabilities. According to the NYT, these cyber-attacks were to be expected to hit right after Orthodox Christmas, the end of the last week of January.
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