Moscow Exchange Downed by Cyber-Attack

 

On Monday morning, the website for the Moscow Stock Exchange went down, becoming inaccessible. 

The Ukraine crowdsourced community of hackers operated by the Kyiv officials took responsibility for the outage in a message posted to Telegram while claiming the responsibility behind the attack.  

According to the officials early on Monday, the Kyiv officials called on its IT army members to launch attacks on the website. Following the attack, on Telegram, the IT Army claimed that it took only five minutes to knock the site down. However, as of now, its claims could not be verified. 

NetBlocks, a global internet connectivity tracking company reported that the site went offline on early Monday. However, the root cause behind the incident is still unknown. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister made a formal public statement on the incident and celebrated the formation of the IT army on Facebook. “The mission has been accomplished! Thank you!” the statement read. 

Also, last week Mykhailo Fedorov announced the formation of the IT Army and listed names of prominent Russian websites that the state-sponsored hackers could look to attack. 

In the middle of Monday afternoon, Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender website also went offline. The outage was reported by NetBlocks and celebrated by Fedorov, who declared: “Sberbank fell!” on social media. 

Further, Bloomberg reports that depositary receipts for Sberbank of Russia PJSC sank as much as 77%, while Gazprom PJSC dropped by 62%. 

Following the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, the cyber threat Intelligence in their latest reports explained threats on cyberspace while saying that the outcome of this will affect every nation in the coming days, not just Ukraine. For now, the current situation changes the cybersecurity picture and worries the nations with the latest developments in cyberspace. 

Ultimately, critical infrastructures like power, banking, military infrastructures, and telecom are being targeted by the state actors, and the assets of several countries are increasingly coming under its grip. The US and UK have already issued warnings of potential cyber-attacks coming in the backdrop of the Russian military invasion in Ukraine.