According to the White House, Russia is responsible for the cyber attacks that took down the websites of Ukraine’s government agencies and major banks in January. Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor to the Government, called The government has “technical information linking Russia’s General Intelligence Directorate, or GRU,” to the hacks. Neuberger added that “GRU infrastructure has been observed transferring large volumes of communications to Ukraine-based IP addresses and domains.”
Accordingly AP and Reuters, Britain has also publicly attributed the incident to Russia, stating that the country’s military intelligence agency is almost certainly involved. While the attacks managed to disable the targeted Ukrainian websites, Neuberger said they had “limited impact” thanks to the country’s officials who quickly secured and restored them.
The websites targeted included the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, and a message left by the attackers in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish read, translated, “Ukrainians! All your personal information has been uploaded to the public network. All the data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to recover it.” The message also referred to the “historic country,” showing crossed-out versions of the Ukrainian map and flag.
At the time, the Ukrainian Ministry of Information said there were initial indications that Russia had carried out the attacks. Furthermore, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy pointed out that references to Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups are just an attempt by the Russians to cover up their footprint.
Neuberger said the White House is publicly calling out the Kremlin because “[t]The global community must stand ready to expose malicious cyber activity and hold actors accountable for any disruptive or destructive cyber activity.” Although the attacks had “limited impact,” the White House believes Russia could engage in more disruptive activity Future followed by an invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has announced on Friday that the US has received information showing that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine in the coming days.
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