Ukrainian defense ministry and two banks hit by DDoS, attacks came from Uzbekistan as well, says minister

A powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack hit Ukraine on Tuesday, targeting the websites of the country’s armed forces, defense ministry, public radio and two biggest national banks — Privatbank and Oschadbank — and knocking some services offline.

Privatbank and Oschadbank were down for two hours, starting around 3 pm local time – leaving mobile apps and online payments inaccessible. The attack didn’t affect the website of Ukraine’s Central Bank.

About five hours later, banks said their websites are back and are operating normally. Privatbank, which serves over 20 million Ukrainians, said that there is a possibility of another attack.

Ukraine’s public radio also suffered an attack, but it didn’t bring its website down, said its general producer Dmitry Khorkin in a Facebook post.

According to Mykhailo Fedorov, the Minister of Digital Transformation, the initial attack came from Russia and China. “There were somewhere around 600,000 packets of malicious traffic per second. Our experts quickly “cut off” this direction, but the attack returned from the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan. And it was repulsed again,” Fedorov said.

He added that the work continues under constant pressure and provocations, but is maximally mobilized and concentrated.

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