KYIV. Feb 16 (Interfax) - The official website of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine has been subjected to an unprecedented DDoS attack aiming to overload the website's server capacities as much as possible, the press service for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.
"The perpetrators probably knew that the website is protected against classic DDos attacks and this is why they started looking for vulnerabilities in the code of the website itself. We can state that, unfortunately, they succeeded in it," the press service said.
The Defense Ministry's experts, with the support of all entities dealing with cybersecurity, put up additional defenses and did special technical work to resume the website's normal operations, it said.
"Our partners from the United States also offered support to us by providing technical consultations and additional protection services, which once again confirms the political agreements on cooperation in cyber security reached as early as in November 2021," the Defense Ministry said.
Before the website's operations were resumed, experts of the ministry "determined the reasons why it stopped operating, coordinated its actions with the NCSCC of the NSDC [National Cybersecurity Coordination Center at the National Security and Defense Council], the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], Derzhspetszviazok [State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection], and experts of other entities also subjected to the attack," it said.
"This cyberattack on the website of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine provided us with an opportunity to strengthen the website's cyber-security and establish close cooperation both with our foreign partners and with colleagues from various Ukrainian agencies. The Defense Ministry of Ukraine understands without an excessive sense of tragedy, but with due diligence, that attacks will continue and sometimes result in a temporary interruption of its work, at least until the website is professionally updated. An update of the website's software has been scheduled and will take place as planned," the ministry said.
As reported, on Tuesday, February 15, operations of the official websites of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as well as services two national banks, were disrupted.
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 launching them and making payments.
Privatbank has denied any problems, calling the reports misinformation, and Oschadbank said it was dealing with the issues.
It emerged later that the Diia app team has repelled cyberattacks from four countries, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, and Uzbekistan.