A state-owned aerospace and defense firm from Russia called Rostec has reported a cyberattack incident that took down its website. According to Rostec, their website has already been receiving signs of cyberattack since last February upon the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The state defense firm also added that they attribute the attack threats to Ukrainian activists. Shortly after their website went offline, the firm has immediately fixed the issue to bring it back live.
Temporarily closing the website to fix the issue is a measure that Rostec had to take to repel the cyberattack and have it function again in its full capacity, which has been a successful process.
According to Rostec, the Ukrainian activists behind the attack were those under its IT Army.
Ukraine’s IT Army is a group of volunteers from all over the world, formed to support Ukraine against the cyberattack threats coming from Russia amid the two countries’ current geopolitical conflict.
The defense agency found that Ukraine’s IT Army was behind the cyberattacks against them after discovering that they had been assigned to be a target with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from a malicious Telegram channel run by the said threat group.
The takedown of Rostec’s website has transpired after Russia shared a list containing more than 17,000 IP addresses used by hackers to execute DDoS attacks to target their networks and infrastructure. These attacks have driven an FSB agency called the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTsKI) to warn Russian organisations to secure their infrastructure against all forms of cyberattacks.
Aside from the attack threats by the Russian military on the Ukrainian field, the threats of cyber warfare have led the latter country to form the IT Army, aiming to help them fight against the cyberattacks from Russia and launch the same attacks against the opposing country.
The attacks of Ukraine’s IT Army have resulted in several Russian websites and online portals shutting down, based on the reports made by Ukrainian cybersecurity authorities.
One of the attack activities launched by the IT Army is the hacking and defacing of different Russian federal agencies, such as the Energy Ministry and the Federal State Statistics Service. Several other Russian websites have also discovered constant cyberattacks from other countries besides Ukraine.
