Ukraine knocks out Russian services in 'large-scale' DDoS attack

Weddings have been canceled “en-masse” in Russia as a result of a cyberattack against the country’s institutions claimed by Ukraine.

A number of Russian state and private institutions experienced outages as a result of a major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack carried out by Ukraine’s cybersecurity experts, the Ukrainska Pravda website reported citing a source in the Ukrainian intelligence.

It said specialists from Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU), a governmental agency, are behind a “large-scale” attack. Russia’s media oversight authority Roskomnadzor earlier said the disruptions were caused by an accident in the main telecommunications center.

However, the Federal Customs Service acknowledged it had suffered a DDoS attack. The website and services of the Russian State Tax Service were also unavailable.

As of June 5th, Russians did not have access to the electronic services of ministries of defense, finance, internal affairs, justice, industry and energy, IT and communications, and emergencies.

The operations of VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network, were also disrupted, as were the online services of some of its major banks, including Sberbank and AlfaBank.

The servers of the Russian cloud storage company Gosoblako were also affected by the cyberattack and the country’s unified civil registration system has not been working for several days, which resulted in Russians “complaining en masse” about canceled weddings, the intelligence source told Ukrainska Pravda.