By contrast, cyber activity against Ukraine has been muted so far, despite widespread predictions that a Russian military assault on the country would be combined with digital shock and awe. Ukrainian websites were hit with DDoS attacks ahead of the offensive, including the Ukrainian defence ministry and PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest commercial bank, but there has been nothing on the scale of the NotPetya assault in 2017 – when a devastating malware attack attributed to Russia destroyed computers in Ukraine and around the world. Cloudflare, a US tech firm that protects companies against DDoS attacks, described the initial denial of service sorties last week as “relatively modest”. The UK and US governments have already blamed an earlier set of DDoS attacks against Ukrainian websites, on 15 and 16 February, on Moscow.
Anonymous: the hacker collective that has declared cyberwar on Russia
The group has claimed credit for hacking the Russian Ministry of Defence database, and is believed to have hacked multiple state TV channels to show pro-Ukraine content
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Nonetheless, the cyber dimension to the Ukraine conflict has been low-key up to this point. Ciaran Martin, professor of practice at the Blavatnik school of government at Oxford University and former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, says cyber has played “remarkably little part” in the conflict, at least so far.
“The cyber activity from Russia against Ukraine has been there, but is consistent with Russia’s cyber harassment of the country going back years. Similarly, from what we can see, the response against Russia from the west has not had a strong cyber component so far – it has been about stringent sanctions. All of this might change, and the west is right to remain on high alert for increased cyber activity.”