In what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack amid heightened tensions with Russia, more than 70 Ukrainian government websites went offline for hours on Friday.
Oleg Nikolenko, MFA spokesperson, tweeted, “As a result of a massive cyber attack, the websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other government agencies are temporarily down,”
The Ukrainian Security Service, the country’s law enforcement agency, hinted at Russian involvement, blaming hacker groups linked to Russian secret services and branding the intrusions as a supply chain attack involving hacking the “infrastructure of a commercial company that had access to the rights to administer the web resources affected by the attack.”
Prior to the SSU’s update, the Ukrainian CERT alleged that the attacks may have exploited a security flaw in the Laravel-based October CMS (CVE-2021-32648), which could be exploited by an adversary to gain access to an account by using a specially crafted request.
The attack hit a number of official websites, including those for Ukraine’s Cabinet, education, agriculture, emergency, energy, veterans affairs, and environment ministries, among others, with 10 of them being “subjected to unauthorized interference.”
The security agency, on the other hand, maintained that the content of the websites was not tampered with and that no critical and personal information was stolen.
The SSU said “Provocative messages were posted on the main page of the websites,”
“The content of the sites was not changed, and, according to preliminary information, no leakage of personal data occurred.”
“The purpose of such attacks is to destabilize the internal situation in the country, as well as to sow chaos and disbelief in society,” the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security said, noting the hacks amount to “psychological pressure and intimidation.”