Cyber War Excites, Attacks And Disturbances On Russian Websites Increase Sharply Since Invasion Of Ukraine

JAKARTA – Attempts to disrupt the company's website operations in Russia have spiked in March. This was revealed by , a cybersecurity company on Friday, March 11. The number of denial of service or DDoS attacks distributed to the country that invaded Ukraine already exceeds the attacks that occurred so far in February.

Russian government entities and state-owned companies have been targeted for their invasion of Ukraine. Websites of the Kremlin, major airline Aeroflot and major lending institution Sberbank are among the Russian sites that have experienced temporary outages or problems with access.

Rostelecom-Solar, the cybersecurity arm of Russian telecommunications firm Rostelecom, said last Friday it had noted increased activity on hacker forums from February 22-23. This mass attack on Russian authorities' internet resources began on February 25.

"The main target of the attackers continues to be a government resource," Rostelecom-Solar said in a statement. They recorded around 1,700 DDoS attacks against a government portal in the red bear country in the last three days alone.

The business sector in Russia has also been targeted. Especially the banking sector, which is also heavily sanctioned by Western powers.

"Rostelecom-Solar specialists have noted significant growth in DDoS attacks in the commercial segment. More than 1,100 such attacks were recorded here from March 1 to 10, which has surpassed the figure for the whole of February," said Rostelecom-Solar.

More than 450 attacks were recorded against banks, four times higher than the attack figure in February.

Rostelecom-Solar did not say where the attack came from or who was suspected of being responsible for carrying out the attack on a network of government and business websites in Russia. This attack indicates cyber war has become a new pillar of the online battle of each warring party.