Ukraine’s POW HQ Hit by Cyberattack

A cyberattack has targeted the Ukrainian government department that oversees issues relating to POWs, authorities have said.

The website of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (KSHPPV) was hit by a DDoS attack on Sunday.

In a post on Telegram, the KSHPPV said: “Apparently, the enemy decided that information, in particular, about the details of the exchange of prisoners of war and the downing of an IL-76 aircraft, poses a threat to them.”

Temporary restrictions have been placed on the website as a security measure.

The attack comes just a few days after a Russian IL-76 plane fell from the sky in Russia’s western Belgorod region, crashing into the ground in a giant fireball.

Russia has claimed 65 Ukrainian POWs were on board but has yet to provide evidence, sparking a heated war of words between Kyiv and Moscow.

The cyberattack on KSHPPV is just the latest that have hit both Ukrainian and Russian targets.

Last week, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s largest gas and oil company, said on social media that its data center was undergoing a cyberattack, rendering its website and call service unavailable.

The day before, Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) reported a cyberattack on Russia’s Far Eastern Scientific Research Center of Space Hydrometeorology, a state enterprise responsible for receiving and processing military satellite data.

On Jan. 22, Ukraine’s Monobank underwent a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the most powerful the bank has undergone to date “with a total load of 580 million service requests,” according to its CEO.

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On Jan. 16, a group of IT volunteers in Ukraine said it launched a DDoS attack on an internet provider in Moscow.

In December, Russian hackers launched a large-scale cyberattack on Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications company, dealing extensive damage to the system and rendering its services unavailable for days.