Hackers attacked several Ukrainian government websites on Thursday night.
The websites of the cabinet, the foreign ministry, civil protection, the energy ministry and the education ministry were all affected.
The home page of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry read a text in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish that states that all data on the computers has been irretrievably deleted and that Ukrainians' personal data will be published on the publicly accessible Internet: "Be afraid and expect this worst!”
Reinhard Veser
Editor in Politics.
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The website of the “Dija” app was also affected by the hacker attacks.
This smartphone app, which went live in spring 2020, can be used by Ukrainians to identify themselves electronically and to use government services.
According to Ukrainian media, only the website was affected, the app itself was working.
The Ukrainian authority for data security announced on Facebook in the morning that no personal data of Ukrainians was leaked during the attacks.
In order to prevent the attack from spreading and to localize the technical problem, other state websites were taken offline.
There was initially no official information about the background to the attacks.
The Ukrainian secret service said it was investigating the incident.
The text on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, addressed to Ukrainians, says: “This is for your past, present and future. For Volhynia, the OUN UPA, for Galicia, for Polesia and for the historical areas.” This text alludes to Polish-Ukrainian conflicts. During the Second World War, bloody clashes broke out between Ukrainian and Polish partisans in the aforementioned regions in western Ukraine, during which primarily Ukrainian nationalists of the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out massacres on the Polish civilian population. However, the expression of the "historical areas" corresponds to the Russian usage; it was also used by President Putin to describe Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, there have been repeated attacks on Ukrainian internet resources.
Russian hackers first drew attention to themselves in an international conflict in 2007.
At the time, government and bank websites in Estonia were attacked after a Soviet war memorial in the capital Tallinn was moved from the center to a war graves cemetery on the outskirts of the city, despite Russian protests.