A number of key government websites in Ukraine could not be accessed on Thursday morning local time, after several days earlier also suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber attack.
The sites that cannot be accessed include the sites of the Cabinet Ministry, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Infrastructure, Ministry of Education, and others.
Not only that, there are also more dangerous cyber attacks, which have also recently been discovered. That is data-deleting malware found on hundreds of computers in Ukraine, discovered by security researchers, who suspect that this is part of a cyber-attack campaign prepared by Russia for Ukraine.
"We discovered that several commercial and governmental organizations in Ukraine were impacted by malicious malware activity today," said Charles Carmakal, SVP and CTO of Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm.
The hacking took place after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for Russia to limit its military actions.
Meanwhile, the United States government has warned that Russia is almost certain to carry out cyber attacks to accompany its military action in Russia.
US President Joe Biden warned in January that if Russia insisted on continuing its cyber attacks on Ukraine, the US could respond by carrying out cyber attacks on Russia.
Currently, Russian President Vladimir Putin has started his military operations in Ukraine. But in fact, the Russian cyberattack on Ukraine started some time ago.
"Russia didn't suddenly decide to invade Ukraine this week. Military planners had prepared for this campaign a year in advance," explains Rick Holland, Chief Information Security Officer at a cybersecurity firm called Digital Shadows.
The cyber attack campaign took the form of spreading hoaxes, DDoS attacks, and infiltrating data-deleting malware into various computer systems in Ukraine. All of that, according to Holland, is part of Russian military doctrine.
Previously, it was reported that various Ukrainian bank and government websites had experienced mass DDoS attacks, which made the sites inaccessible.