Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said its cyber specialists disrupted fuel card payment systems and shut down dozens of Russian online pages in a coordinated cyberattack timed with Sunday’s Military Intelligence Day.
The cyberattack also came amid intensified physical strikes against Russian oil refineries, pipelines and depots in recent weeks.
According to Kyiv Post’s intelligence sources, the operation began on Sunday, Sept. 7, with a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting the network infrastructure that enables fuel payments in Russia, including platforms handling fuel cards.
DDos is a form of cyberattack that aims to paralyze a system by flooding it with automated requests, rendering the service unavailable.
Among the affected systems were the “Advanced Payment Systems” platform used for RosPetrol fuel cards, as well as servers belonging to digital firm Rostelecom and energy corporation Lukoil.
The sources estimated the damages to Russia from the disruption to be between $1 million and $3 million.
Later the same day, Ukrainian cyber units struck the information and communication infrastructure of telecom operator K-Corp, which provides services to Russian defense firm Kalashnikov Concern. More than 700 switches and 13 servers in two data centers were disabled, fully halting K-Corp’s operations, the source said.
Dozens of Russian websites were also defaced, displaying messages marking Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Day.
Military intelligence sources said the operations against Russian companies supporting the war will continue “until the complete de-occupation of Ukrainian territories and the fair punishment of the aggressor.”
In July, HUR gained full access to the internal servers and documentation of the Russian-installed occupation authorities in Crimea after another cyber operation.
A HUR source told Kyiv Post that the large-scale cyberattack in July lasted several days. It began with a powerful DDoS attack that paralyzed key information systems and network infrastructure across the peninsula.
The source said that while the occupation authorities scrambled to identify the cause of the collapse, HUR cyber specialists infiltrated internal portals belonging to the top leadership of the so-called “Russian Republic of Crimea.”
As a result, the Ukrainian team accessed and extracted data from several critical digital systems, including the electronic document management system “DIALOG,” the system “SЕD,” the “Delo” accounting software, “1C:Document Management,” “Directum,” and “Atlas.”