Recent Ukraine outage caused by modest cyberattack, data shows

NetScout Systems

17/02/2022 15:58

Feb 17 (Reuters) - The blast of rogue traffic that briefly
overwhelmed Ukrainian servers earlier this week was modest
compared to digital onslaughts recorded elsewhere, U.S. company
Netscout Systems Inc  NTCT.O  said Thursday.
    The distributed denial of service - often abbreviated DDoS -
hit Ukraine's defense ministry website and several banks on
Tuesday, briefly knocking them offline and interrupting
services.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2UQ1R9
    Kyiv blamed Moscow for the digital disruption amid
heightened tensions since Russia began massing more than 100,000
troops near the border, raising fears Russia is planning to
attack Ukraine. The Kremlin denied involvement in the denial of
service and has repeatedly denied it plans to invade Ukraine.
 urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2US0M8    
    Ukrainian officials described the outages as the result of
"the largest DDoS ​attack in the history of Ukraine," but
Netscout said that the digital flood was pretty standard.
    "It's possible that it was the largest they'd seen against
targets," said Richard Hummel, who heads the threat intelligence
team at Netscout's ASERT unit. 
    "It is definitely not the largest we've seen."
    Distributed denial of service works by hammering target
networks with floods of traffic from multiple sources at once,
snarling access to websites and sometimes leading to wider
disruption as overwhelmed servers fall offline.
    Netscout said its experts had seen floods of data packets
reaching 5.2 gigabits per second - hundreds of times less
powerful than what it said was the most powerful denial of
service of 2021 which clocked in at 3.5 terabits per second.
    Hummel cautioned that Netscout's information was drawn from
"observations from the outside looking in," but his assessment
echoed what San Francisco-based Cloudflare, a prominent provider
of denial of service protection, told Reuters on Wednesday. 
    In an email, the company said it had seen no evidence of
"large DDoS activity" in Ukraine against its data centres or
customers there.

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Ukraine defence ministry website, banks, knocked offline   
 urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2UQ1R9
U.S. says war appears imminent after shelling on Ukraine front
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 (Reporting by Raphael Satter; Additional reporting by James
Pearson; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
 ((Raphael.Satter@thomsonreuters.com;))