At present, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a mobilization of hackers and cyber activists seeking to help one part or another of the conflict by taking action against multiple targets, but the results are still inaccurate and difficult to verify.
“There have been no major cyberattacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, and now we are seeing a chaos of allegations of unverifiable hacks and operations, the scale of which is extremely difficult to assess,” wrote our Pixels service in an article.
The most serious threat was posed by malware discovered on the night of February 23-24, shortly before the start of the Russian military invasion. This virus, nicknamed HermeticWiper because of the signature of a digital certificate that points to a small Cypriot company (which denies any involvement), is designed to wipe the contents of infected computers. According to Bloomberg, at least three Ukrainian entities were affected by this wiper (data destruction software), including the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
In response dated February 26, Minister of Digital Transition of Ukraine Mikhail Fedorov announced creation of “computer army of Ukraine”. There are missions for everyone! “, he began on Twitter, providing the address of the group in Telegram, which quickly joined more than 250,000 people.
People calling themselves members of the Anonymous group also said on Monday that they were responsible for the cyberattack that paralyzed the websites of several Russian media outlets, including government ones, after computer attacks targeted many officials in recent days. Russian sites.
Within minutes, the websites of the state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, the Kommersant newspaper, the pro-Kremlin daily Izvestia, and Forbes Russia magazine posted a message calling for an “end” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The digital skirmishes of recent days are still far from the scale of other attacks carried out in Ukraine by pro-Russian groups or groups associated with the Russian state in recent years.
If you want to know more about the reasons for this apparent lack of cyberattacks, we also recommend reading this article by our colleagues Martin Untersinger and Elisa Vincent:
See also: War in Ukraine: why cyberattacks seem limited so far