The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine claimed that all evidence indicates Moscow was behind Friday’s attack on Kiev’s governmental websites. The statement arrived less than a day after the deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Sergey Demedyuk, blamed the incident on Belarus.
In Ukraine, on the night of January 13-14, a global hacker attack was carried out on the websites of ministries and the Cabinet of Ministers. Yesterday, the country’s Digital Transformation Ministry published an article in which it said, “all the evidence points to the fact that Russia was behind the cyberattack.” It provided no specific examples to back up the assertion but called on Ukrainians not to “panic,” assuring them that their personal data was securely stored in “appropriate registers” that were inaccessible to hackers.
“Gosspetsvyaz [State Information Security Service], together with the SBU [Ukrainian Security Service] and the Cyber Police, continues to investigate the cyberattack on the websites of state authorities. As of now, we can say that all the evidence indicates that Russia is behind the cyberattack. Moscow continues to wage a hybrid war and is actively building up its forces in information and cyberspace,” the article claimes.
The article’s author proceeded to claim that “most often, Russia’s cyber forces work against the US and Ukraine, trying to use technology to shake up the political situation.”
“The latest cyberattack is one of the manifestations of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine, which has been going on since 2014. Its goal is not only to intimidate society. But also to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, stopping the work of the public sector and undermining confidence in the authorities on the part of Ukrainians,” the author continued.
Russia is also accused in the article of the alleged possibility of “throwing fakes into the information space about the vulnerability of critical information infrastructure and the “leak” of the personal data of Ukrainians.”
The previous day, Demedyuk had insisted that the “cyber-espionage group” in question is understood to be “affiliated with the special services of the Republic of Belarus.” He noted that the malicious software used in the attack was “very similar” to that used by groups previously blamed for cyberattacks in the US, such as those accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
However, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, suggested Moscow might be behind it. In turn, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told CNN in an interview scheduled for broadcast on Sunday that Russia had “nothing to do with these cyberattacks” and called all the allegations against Moscow “yet another baseless accusation.”
Ru-Main, 17.01.2022
Source: RT
