Nearly 4,000 cyberattacks reported in Ukraine since start of war

Nearly 4,000 cyberattacks were recorded by Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team between January 2022 and September 2023, a U.S. Treasury Department official stated on Nov. 17.

"In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian state-sponsored cyber actors conducted a wave of cyberattacks against Ukrainian infrastructure," said Graham Steele, Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The total number of attacks represents three times more than in the time period immediately prior to Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Cyber warfare against Ukraine and its allies has been a critical part of Russia’s war. Recently, a Russian-speaking criminal group known as CL0P breached the email addresses of 632,000 employees from the U.S. Justice and Defense departments.

Steele also emphasized the involvement of non-state actors directing their efforts towards a wide range of organizations and individuals worldwide through relatively simple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, particularly in the financial services sector. In June 2023, the pro-Russian ransomware group NoName057(16) threatened to attack Ukraine's financial sector, leading to numerous Ukrainian banks experiencing DDoS attacks over the next four days.

Over the course of the war, Ukraine has invested heavily in its cyber defense capabilities and has increased its own offensive cyber tactics targeting Russian assets.

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The Kyiv IndependentThe Kyiv Independent news desk