To extend it crisiss in Ukraine in cyberspace, reports from the New York Times and the MIT Technology Review report that hackers are launching attacks against informational and other websites.
According to internet experts security, there is an unusually high prevalence of denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which attackers "flood" a website with traffic to cause it to go down. As the NY Times reports, the attacks target both pro-Western and Ukrainian pro-Russian news sites. In one case, attackers vandalized the website of Russia Today, replacing the word "Russia" with the word "nazi" in headlines and text.
As pointed out by experts, the attacks observed on pro-Western Ukrainian sites refer to attacks against Chechen news websites, which are characterized as "under constant siege". However, according to Matthew Prince, its CEO and co-founder Cloudflare (San Francisco), it is not clear who is behind the attacks.
"I do not think it can be said that it is an attack on a state-owned entity," he said.
So far, activity remains at levels lower than those seen in Estonia in 2007, or in Georgia in 2008, where servers that hosted websites of the government, the media, etc. had collapsed due to a "flood" of data containing the message "win+love+in+Russia".
As reported in a MIT Technology Review, the Russian intervention in the Crimea seems to be accompanied by an "information control" campaign with a cut-off of cables linking the region with the rest of the country and blocking access to websites supporting the anti-government movement on its part Russian government. However, as pointed out, there is no evidence of more serious cyber attacks against military or governmental targets.
So far, "Russia has been confined to the things that are usually done at the beginning of a conflict with the aim of shaping public opinion, the communist" choking "of critics and the promotion of its visual angle," says James Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
According to the MIT Technology Review, Ukraine's national telephone company, Ukrtelecom, announced on Tuesday that "unknown vandals" had been snooping to cut off many of the communications (data and voice) links between the Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.
As noted in the report, both Russia and Ukraine are well-known centers of international cybercrime, where hackers are located. However, no massive cyber attacks have been observed so far. "In Georgia, we had incidents of cyber attacks in coordination with military operations. But the Russians have not done so. If violence breaks out in the Crimea, I think it will intensify the activity, "estimates Lewis.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
