Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked battles not only on the ground but also in the digital world, with so-called “white hat hackers” and hacktivists globally mounting billions of cyber attacks in support of the beleaguered nation.
According to the recent findings by the Atlas VPN team, 89% of cyberattacks worldwide are targeting Russia and Ukraine. In addition, a significant amount of cyberattacks are directed at financial services businesses, with Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks making up 90% of all cyberattacks.
Cybercriminals launched 70% of cyberattacks on Russia. A total of 5 billion attacks were inbound to Russia on March 5, with hackers declaring a full-on cyberwar 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 cyberattacks. Just days before the war in Ukraine, Russian hackers brought down the websites of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the two largest banks with DDoS attacks.
Cyberattacks targeting the United States made up 5% of all threats worldwide.
DDoS attacks have been the most widely used threats by a large margin, causing 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 cyberattacks globally.
The financial services sector stands out when looking at the most attacked industries. Banks and other payment processing companies suffered from 72% of cyberattacks worldwide.
Cybercriminals chose the business industry as their target in 21% of attacks. The computing and IT sector suffered from 2% of cyberattacks globally. All other industries accounted for 5% of attacks.
Cybersecurity writer at Atlas VPN Vilius Kardelis said: “Cyberwarfare 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.”
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