“Ukrposhta,” the national postal service of Ukraine came under a series of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Monday for over 48 hours (2 days) forcing the service to go offline.
The postal service is run by the company’s Infrastructure Ministry and has 12,000 postal offices and 76,000 workers all over the country.
Ukraine’s Interfax news agency reported that for now, it is unclear who was behind these attacks however the targeted computers belonged to the shipments and parcels tracking system.
The department updated its customers via their Facebook page on Tuesday stating that: “During the first wave of the attack, which began yesterday in the morning, our IT services normalized the situation, and after 5 p.m., all the services on the site worked properly. But today, hackers are at it again. Due to their actions, both the website and services are working, but slowly and with interruptions.”
Ukraine has consistently been under large scale cyber attacks including malware campaigns and other cyber espionage against government institutions and critical infrastructure. Just a couple of months ago, Ukraine’s super markets came under Petya wiper malware attack.
Ukranian police then seized servers of a company associated with the spreading of Petya in the country. Furthermore, the country’s airport (1), energy plant (2), and power grid (3) also came under highly sophisticated malware attacks.
Since 2016, not only has there been a surge in large scale DDoS attacks, but the duration of those attacks have also increased. About a week ago, a Chinese Telecom firm suffered DDoS attacks that lasted for 11 days, approx. 227 hours.
While in March this year, cyber criminals used a variant of Mirai malware to launch a 54-hour DDoS attack on a US college. If you are running a business; calculate the cost and probability of a DDoS attack on your business with this DDoS Downtime Cost Calculator.
