More Twitter accounts linked to the Ukrainian
government came under attack on July 14, less than a day after the country’s
National Security and Defense Council’s account started tweeting that it had
been taken over by an ultranationalist group.
The personal Twitter account of Interior Minister
Arsen Avakov appeared to have been hacked shortly after noon on July 14, with
“Avakov” tweeting that his account was now under the control of the Right
Sector group.
“Arsen: Do you remember Sashko Biliy?” read one tweet,
referring to a far-right Ukrainian nationalist shot dead by police near the
town of Rivne last year.
Another tweet claimed Avakov was providing political
cover for smuggling in Kharkiv oblast.
A similar message had appeared on the Twitter account
of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council the previous day, with the
account going on to tweet spurious messages, among them ones calling for
Avakov’s resignation, and for police officers in Mukavcheve to be arrested.
Right Sector was involved in a shootout with police
over the weekend in Mukavcheve, a western Ukrainian town, in an incident some
have linked to a dispute over the lucrative cigarette smuggling business.
However, National Security and Defense Council
spokeswoman Anna
Vakhotskaya told the Kyiv Post on July 13 that the council did not believe
Right Sector was behind the hacking, and instead pinned blame on the Russian
intelligence services.
“We
can track down who did this,” Vakhotskaya said. “We’re quite certain right now
that this is the Russian security services trying to cause panic about Right
Sector.”
Meanwhile,
the account of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (@FIS_ua) tweeted that it
had come under attack in the early hours of July 14, with numerous suspicious
sign-in attempts being logged by Twitter. The service tweeted that its
specialists were looking into the incident.
Interior
Ministry spokesman Artyom Shevchenko was not available for comment on the
matter.
Also
on July 14, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported that the Twitter account
of the Presidential Administration in Ukraine had been hacked.
Presidential
Administration spokesman Andriy Zhigulin told the Kyiv Post the incident was
part of a coordinated attack.
“It’s
not just us. Avakov’s account was also hacked, as well as that of the Foreign
Intelligence Service. We are conducting an investigation into the incident but
can’t say right now who was behind it,” Zhigulin said.
National Security and Defense Council spokeswoman Vakhotskaya, while
claiming Russia was behind the hacking of the council’s Twitter account, said
the hacker, or hackers, had been using an IP address within Ukraine. She said
an investigation into the hack attack was going on.
Ukraine
has a bad reputation as being a haven for hackers, with experts saying
gap-ridden and ill-thought-out legislation makes it easier for Internet
miscreants to carry out attacks, and get away with it.
Although
it is not known that Russia is behind the attacks on the Ukrainian
government-linked Twitter accounts, suspicions have fallen on Moscow before of
being behind cyber-attacks on its neighbors.
The
government of Estonia, which prides itself on conducting much of its business
via the Internet, was virtually paralyzed in 2007, along with banks,
newspapers, and broadcasters, in what was believed to be a major
state-sponsored cyber-attack.
Estonian
government ministers accused the Kremlin of being behind the attacks, but later
admitted they had no direct evidence Moscow was to blame.
A
20-year-old ethnic-Russian Estonian man was tried and convicted in 2008 for
taking part in the cyber-attack. Dmitri
Galushkevich was fined 17,500 kroons (about $1,500) for blocking the website of
the Reform Party of then-Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.
Staff writer Allison Quinn contributed to this report.
She can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post editor Euan MacDonald can be
reached at [email protected]
