Hours after the Russian forces received orders from President Vladimir V Putin to march into two Russia-backed separatist territories in Ukraine and hinted at the possibility of a wider military campaign, Britain has warned of potential cyberattacks with “international consequences”
According to Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of the GCHQ eavesdropping intelligence agency called on British organisations to “bolster their online defences” following the developments.
“While the NCSC is not aware of any current specific threats to UK organisations in relation to events in and around Ukraine, there has been a historical pattern of cyber attacks on Ukraine with international consequences,” NCSC said in a statement.
Last week, Ukrainian banking and government websites were briefly knocked offline by a spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which the United States and Britain said were carried out by Russian military hackers. Russia rejected the allegations.
Six European Union countries are sending a team of cybersecurity experts to Ukraine to help deal with cyber threats, Lithuania’s deputy defence minister said on Tuesday.
In response to a request from Ukraine on Monday, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Romania, Croatia will send the team of experts they set up earlier to help other EU countries, institutions and partners to cope with cyber threats, Deputy Defence Minister Margiris Abukevicius said.
