Ukraine's military intelligence behind cyberattack on Russian banks, source says
Ukraine's military intelligence agency was responsible for a cyberattack that caused outages across a variety of sectors in Russia, an agency source confirmed to the Kyiv Independent on July 24.
Earlier in the day, Russian media reported on outages from several top banks, including Raiffeisen, Gazprombank, Rosselkhozbank, and Rosbank. The outages also reportedly impacted social networks, payment systems on public transport, and some airlines.
The press service of Rosselkhozbank confirmed to Interfax Russia that it had been subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that interrupted its online services.
While Rosbank and other companies said they were working to restore accessibility, the military intelligence source said that the attacks were "ongoing and is far from being completed."
Ukraine's military intelligence agency has reportedly carried out several cyberattacks in recent months.
Earlier in July, the agency claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on nearly 100 Russian websites that support the Kremlin's war effort. The attack took the sites offline and replaced their homepages with a picture of a bloody pig's head.
A large-scale cyberattack in late June left at least 250,000 consumers in occupied Crimea and other Russian-controlled territories without communication, a military intelligence source told the Kyiv Independent.
The attack in June reportedly affected both the networks of consumers and the networks of operators that used the impacted infrastructure on Russian-occupied territories. Representatives of Russian providers called it "the most powerful DDoS attack they have ever experienced," a military intelligence source said.
The Kyiv Independent could not verify the claims of the agency's responsibility in these cyberattacks.
Sonya Bandouil
