Ukraine’s military intelligence service has warned that Russia is preparing a widespread and systematic cyberattack on Ukraine and its allies’ key infrastructure.
According to the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (HUR MO), the massive wave of incoming attacks will most likely focus on obstructing and destroying energy industry facilities and institutions, drawing on the experience of cyberattacks on Ukraine’s energy systems in 2015 and 2016.
The most likely target of the cyber-attacks would be to stop the ongoing attack by the Ukrainian army and to amplify the devastating effects of missile attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities in the east and south.
Russia also intends to intensify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, in which cyber criminals exploit normal network device and server behavior, frequently targeting networking devices that connect to the internet on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine’s closest allies, notably Poland and the Baltic countries.
The warning comes in the wake of a July statement by the Council of the European Union, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the FBI that Russian threat groups could increasingly target critical organizations around the world, leading to escalation and spillover risks.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
