Russian-Ukrainian Online War Has Started, DDos Attacks Attack Ukrainian Government Website

DDos attacks flooded Ukrainian government websites. (photo; pixabay doc)

JAKARTA - Websites of the Ukrainian government, foreign ministry and state security services were forced to close on Wednesday, February 23. This was carried out by the Ukrainian government as the beginning of a massive DDoS attack that started around 4 pm local time or 2100 WIB.

Ukrainian authorities said this week they had seen warnings online that hackers were preparing to launch a full-blown attack against government institutions, banks and the country's defense sector.

Ukraine has experienced a series of cyberattacks they have experienced originating in Russia. Moscow, caught up in an escalating confrontation with the West over Ukraine, has denied involvement in the attack.

"Around 4 pm, another mass DDoS attack in our state started. We have relevant data from a number of banks," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation, as quoted by Reuters. It added that the website of the Ukrainian parliament was also hit.

He did not specify which banks were affected and the central bank could not immediately be reached for comment.

The online network of Ukraine's defense ministry and two banks was overwhelmed last week in separate cyberattacks. US firm Netscout Systems Inc later said the impact was small.

Internet blocking observatory NetBlocks posted a tweet on Thursday last week indicating a drop in connections to Ukrainian government websites.

"We have observed that the current network disruption had a partial impact at the network layer to some defense and ministry websites in Ukraine," NetBlocks director Alp Toker told Reuters.

"The outage deployment is similar, but different from the recent DDOS attacks targeting defense and banking platforms, with the latter unaffected in this respect," he added.

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In Indonesian it can be interpreted as a Distributed Denial of Service. DDoS is a type of attack that is carried out by flooding internet network traffic on servers, systems, or networks.

Generally, this attack is carried out using several attacker's host computer until the target computer cannot be accessed.

DDoS is a very popular attack used by hackers. In addition to having many types, DDoS has a very simple concept, namely making server traffic run with a heavy load until it can no longer accommodate connections from other users (overload).

One way is by sending requests to the server continuously with large data transactions. The success or failure of the DDoS technique is influenced by the ability of the server to accommodate all received requests and also the performance of the firewall when there are suspicious requests.