Ukraine is not only attacked with weapons and soldiers, but also with new hacking tools!
As early as mid-January, hackers had taken over several Ukrainian government websites with hate messages covered – harbingers of the impending war. IT security experts have now discovered that targeted cyber attacks on Ukrainian organizations have been underway since the beginning of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
According to the To analyse several previously unknown malicious programs were used by experts from the security software manufacturer Eset. The researchers dubbed them HermeticWiper, HermeticWizard, and HermeticRansom.
The group of malicious programs was used against several Ukrainian government agencies and organizations a few hours before the Russian invasion on February 23 in order to gain access to computer networks, distribute the attack software in them and ultimately delete data. In order to disguise the attack, the software then attempted to delete itself.
Hundreds of computer systems in at least five Ukrainian organizations were affected by the extinguishing attack. “We believe that it is not possible to restore the affected computers,” write the IT experts in their analysis.
With the start of the invasion, a second attack against a Ukrainian government network began, using another new data erasing program (“wiper”). ESET researchers dubbed it IsaacWiper.
So far, the experts have not been able to determine who is behind the attacks. The hacking tools cannot be assigned to any known threat actor, since there are no significant similarities in the program code with other malicious programs.
However, the analysis of time stamps in the attack programs indicates that the new programs had been prepared for many months and were possibly used in previous attacks on Ukraine.
So far there is no evidence that the malicious programs are also used for attacks outside of Ukraine. However, there is a risk that the hackers will also attack countries that “support the Ukrainian government or sanction Russian institutions,” according to the experts.