This past week has seen an inundation of notifications concerning Russia’s overt and covert efforts to set “their” stage to provide it with a pretext to invade Ukraine once again. The realpolitik of the Russian efforts and the media focus is on the likelihood of Russia taking this course of action.
These preparatory actions include a widespread cyber component. CISOs of entities in defense, intelligence, or critical infrastructure should be monitoring what is taking place in Ukraine and heeding the advisories being issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Microsoft and others.
Cyberattacks on Ukraine
On January 14 at approximately 0200 hours the cyberattacks began. Within the hour news of the hacks began appearing within the Russian media. Approximately 70 Ukrainian government websites saw their forward-facing web presence defaced, and a static message posted in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish in essence told Ukrainians their personal information was compromised and that they should “be afraid and expect the worst.”