Russian hacker groups have staged about 240 cyber-attacks on Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, co-ordinated with Russia’s military strikes, Microsoft’s technology giant Microsoft said on Wednesday.
The company added in a statement that Russia often combines cyber attacks with military attacks on the battlefield in its hybrid warfare tactics.
“Since just before the invasion, we’ve seen at least six separate hacker groups linked to Russia conduct more than 237 operations against Ukraine,” Microsoft said, working with Ukrainian cyber security experts and private companies to counter such attacks.
The company said cyber warfare involved “devastating attacks that continue and threaten the well-being of civilians.”
In the first week of the invasion, Russian hackers attacked the Ukrainian broadcaster “on the same day that Russia announced its intention to destroy Ukraine’s” disinformation “targets and aimed a rocket strike at a television tower in Kiev.”
Microsoft acknowledged that the purpose of such coordinated attacks was “to undermine or degrade the functions of the Ukrainian government and army and to undermine public confidence in those institutions.”
Microsoft said it had tracked nearly 40 devastating cyber-attacks against hundreds of systems. One third of them were directly targeted at Ukrainian government organizations at all levels, while another 40% were targeted at critical infrastructure.
Some of these attacks were such as deleting important data from a hacked computer system.
Hackers used various methods to access Ukrainian systems, such as “phishing, exploiting unavoidable vulnerabilities and compromising IT service providers”.
Microsoft noted that Russian hackers began preparing for their campaign in March 2021, almost a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“As Russian troops began to move to Ukraine’s border, we saw attempts to gain initial access to targets that could provide intelligence on Ukraine’s army and foreign partnerships,” the company said in a statement.
Microsoft noted that its observed cyber-attacks could only be part of such activity against Ukraine.
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