Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to battles being fought not only on the battlefield but also in the digital world. While Russian hackers have a long history of state-sponsored cyber attacks, many white hat hackers and hacktivists globally are standing on the side of Ukraine and helping to fight cyber battles.
According to the recent findings by the Atlas VPN team, 89% of cyber attacks worldwide are targeting Russia and Ukraine. In addition, a significant amount of cyber attacks are directed at financial services businesses. Important to note that Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks made up 90% of all cyber attacks.
Cyber criminals launched 70% of cyber attacks on Russia. A total of five billion attacks were inbound to Russia on 5th March. Anonymous hackers declared a full-on cyber war on Russia. As of now, they have already leaked government employee data and hacked Russian state TV channels.
Threat actors targeted Ukraine in 19% of cyber attacks. Just days before the war in Ukraine, Russian hackers brought down the websites of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and the two largest banks with DDoS attacks.
Cyberattacks targeting the United States made up 5% of all threats worldwide.
Cyber security writer at Atlas VPN, Vilius Kardelis, shares his thoughts on cyber attacks against Russia and Ukraine:
“Cyber warfare is becoming a reality as attacks are used to disrupt essential services. Hackers took control of banking, government, military websites, even TV channels to damage the usual operations of these entities. The battles in the digital world can have a significant impact on communications and propaganda distribution on both sides.”
DDoS attacks disrupt financial services
DDoS attacks were the most widely used threats by a large margin. DDoS attacks cause the victims’ service disruption by flooding the IT infrastructure with more requests per second than the system can process. Such attacks made up 90% of all cyber attacks globally.
The financial services sector stands out when looking at the most attacked industries. Banks and other payment processing companies suffered from 72% of cyber attacks worldwide.
Cyber criminals chose the business industry as their target in 21% of attacks. The computing and IT sector suffered from 2% of cyber attacks globally. All other industries accounted for 5% of attacks.
