KYIV. Feb 16 (Interfax) - About 15 Ukrainian banks were subject to DDos attacks on February 15, Executive Director of the Independent Association of Banks of Ukraine Olena Korobkova said on Wednesday.
"Cyberattacks on 15 banks have been staged since morning. The attacks were smart; they were not the same as previous attacks. They made it seem as if a large number of users were entering the websites, and tried to cause the banks' apps and websites to crash," Korobkova said at the 2022 Legal Banking Forum.
Some state-owned banks report that the operations of their websites remain slow, but the websites are now working, she said.
"As far as I know, several banks suspended foreign traffic and worked only with traffic inside Ukraine," she said.
Korobkova told Interfax that the cyberattacks targeted all government websites and both the Vega and Datagroup communications providers.
The operations of the websites of Ukraine's Defense Ministry and Armed Forces and the services of two state-owned banks were disrupted on February 15.
When attempting to access the defense ministry's website (https://www.mil.gov.ua/), users received "Page Unavailable" and "Website Inaccessible" notifications. The same happened when users tried to go the Armed Forces website (https://www.zsu.gov.ua/).
In addition, Privatbank and Oschadbank clients have reported problems with their mobile applications, including with launching them, as well as making payments.
Privatbank has denied any problems, calling the reports misinformation, and Oschadbank said it was dealing with the issues.
Monobank said that it would turn off foreign enquiries should DDos attacks escalate, while Alfa Bank said that the cyberattack was 200 times more powerful than the website's usual traffic load.
It was later reported that the Diia app's team had repelled hacker attacks originating from four countries - Russia, China, the Czech Republic, and Uzbekistan.