With the Russia-Ukraine war in full swing, cybersecurity experts point to a cyber front that had been forming online long before Russian troops crossed the border. Even in the months leading up to the outbreak of war, Ukrainian websites were attacked and altered to display threatening messages about the coming invasion.
“In response to Russian warfare actions, the hacking collective Anonymous launched a series of attacks against Russia, with the country’s state media being the main target,” said Daniel Markuson, a cybersecurity expert at NordVPN. “So we can see cyber warfare in action with new types of malware flooding both countries, thousands of sites crashing under DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks, and hacktivism thriving on both sides of barricades.”