The secretary of Ukraine’s security council said there were signs of Russian involvement in a wave of cyberattacks that hit Ukrainian institutions on Tuesday, including banks and the state power distributor.
“Already on first analysis of the virus it is possible to talk of Russian fingerprints,” the National Security and Defense Council quoted Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov as saying.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said a wave of cyberattacks was “unprecedented” but had not hit “important” IT systems.
“It was an unprecedented attack, but our IT experts are doing their work and protecting strategic infrastructure. Important systems have not been affected,” he said in a post on Facebook.
An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister said a version of the “WannaCry” ransomware had caused outages on government websites and those of several companies, a cyberattack he called the worst in Ukraine’s history.
Adviser Anton Gerashchenko said Ukrainian IT systems had been targeted with “Cryptolocker” a version of WannaCry, the virus that locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries in May.
“The ultimate goal of the cyberattack was to try to destabilize,” he wrote in a post on Facebook in which he said the attacks probably originated from Russia. {eoa}
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