Ukraine Hit by New Wave of Cyber Attacks As Russian Military Forces Cross Border
As reports are coming in of Russian military forces crossing Ukraine's borders and with president Putin announcing a "special military operation" in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, sources inside Ukraine are reporting a "wave" of cyberattacks that are aimed at the country's infrastructure.
Security researchers working with several security firms that there are hundreds of systems in Ukraine that have been infected with destructive software. This appears to be a widespread event, present in multiple regions of Ukraine, and security researchers believe this is part of an attack that has been in the making for at least a month.
The attack is going to very obviously be blamed on Russian actors, with the concurrent Russian military operation that has already claimed human lives. Just as obviously, Russia has denied all allegations and claimed the country has nothing to do with the attack.
Malicious Tool Named "HermeticWiper"
A sample of the destructive software tool has been uploaded to VirusTotal so the code can be analyzed by a wide variety of companies and experts. The findings so far are unusual, to say the least.
Researchers discovered that the software package was signed with a digital certificate belonging to a certain Hermetica Digital Ltd - a company based in Cyrpus. The malicious software tool has been tentatively named HermeticWiper, after the name of the company entity used to grant it certification. Certification is usually used by threat actors to avoid tripping up automated anti-malware defenses and a valid certificate applied to a malicious tool can help it reach places it should never be able to.
The malicious tool was also timestamped with December 28 of last year, suggesting that this may have been the date when the plan for the ongoing cyberattack may have been set in motion.
Martial Law in Ukraine Amid Cyberattacks and Military Action
Earlier this week, Ukrainian government websites, including those of ministries and banks, were hit by what appeared to be distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The DDoS attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure reportedly started on Wednesday.
A day earlier, the European Union announced the deployment of a rapid-response team in response to calls for assistance on part of Ukraine, to help safeguard against further attacks and help with the current situation. Earlier today Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced martial law in the country, prompted by what can effectively be called Russian invasion inside internationally recognized Ukrainian borders. Russian president Putin seems to have a different view on things, as he announced Russia's official recognition of a Donetsk and a Luhansk "republics".
