DDoS Attacks Target Ukraine

The strife and war in Ukraine is heartbreaking and it is saddening seeing these events on the news. However the way the cyber security of both countries and how they are being used to conduct this war is interesting and worth talking about. The Russian military is the first actor in these known attacks conducting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

What is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack? The general concept of a DDoS attack is to use fake traffic to bottleneck and slow down websites and services, this is often done collectively to effectively overflow the servers. These attacks are often used to cover up more malicious attacks on the system or another area . Managing the area attacked through DDoS often means other areas are left unattended or might not alert to attacks allowing the attackers in.

During the lead up and during the early start the Russian military conducted various attacks on Ukraine some included data wipers but the focus here will be the DDoS attack. This was a effort to create low stability across the country through overflowing servers slowing them down and making then non operational

What have they been doing exactly? The Russian GRU military intelligence agency has taken the blame for the attack the first aspect of this is general denial of service and disruption to the country by making their overall internet less stable. Government disruption seems to have been another aspect they went after notable government websites were unavailable for some time causing communication issues. These attacks also coincided a malware attack conducted on the same day.

How does this affect me? Overall if these style of attacks continue access to banking and other internet based application may be difficult with low response times and poor operational speeds. It had already increase the threat level across numerous countries which could long term require more companies to have increased defences to block such attacks. It could also make general internet use difficult making whole regions slow down and the average load time of simple products such as Netflix slower.