Ukraine suffered another high-profile cyberattack on Tuesday during which the websites of the Ministry of Defense and two large financial institutions, Privatbank and Oschadbank, were targeted, the Ukrainian news portal Pravda reported.
The official website of the Ukrainian armed forces was also hit, with authorities suggesting the attack was different in nature to that experienced in January. It was reportedly a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which overloads a sites’ servers with millions of fake request
The attack began at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, with many Ukraine residents reporting that they could not access their online banking, while others could log in but not complete transactions.
The Department of Defense has confirmed that its website was allegedly attacked by DDoS methods. It has been reported that the site is currently being restored. They added that, until then, official communication would take place through the department’s Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as a website called ArmijaInform.
The Information Security Center of the National Security and Defense Council (RNBO) has also confirmed the DDoS attack and did not rule out Russia as being responsible.
“It is possible that the aggressor (Russia) has resorted to tactics of petty, dirty tricks because his aggressive plans are not coming to fruition,” the UNIAN news agency said.
