While Russia is fighting a physical war on the ground against Ukraine, advanced persistent threat (APT) groups affiliated with or backing Vladimir Putin’s government are ramping up phishing and other attacks against Ukrainian and European targets in cyberspace, Google is warning.
Researchers from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have seen an increase in activity ranging “from espionage to phishing campaigns” from threat groups known as FancyBear/APT28 and Ghostwriter/UNC1151, Shane Huntley, director of software engineering at Google TAG, wrote in a
blog post published Monday. The former has been attributed to Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, and the latter is an actor that Ukraine previously said is part of the Belarusian Ministry of Defense.
Meanwhile, there have been a recent spate of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Ukrainian government sites, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as key services that help Ukrainians find information, such as Liveuamap, according to Google TAG.