Cyber attacks on Ukrainian companies were developed in Russia for at the very least six months, Valentyn Petrov, head of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine`s information security department, said in an interview with Germany`s ZDF, the NSDC press service reported.
”It was a process that lasted for at least six months, which resulted in not only Ukrainian energy companies being affected, which was just the tip of the iceberg, but also a number of other large companies and a national TV channel,” he stated.
According to Petrov, Ukrainian experts have traced the attacks on the energy companies to Russian servers, ”and there are signs that Russian programmers participated in the development of various systems for this.”
”Ukrainian criminologists have analyzed the malware, revealing a great likelihood that the virus was set to operate with the Cyrillic alphabet,” he said. Petrov added that the prototype of the virus, which was used against Ukraine`s power companies, was actively spread on one of the computer forums by a Russian citizen back in 2007.
Besides this, the official claimed there is another piece of evidence confirming that the virus has been created in and launched from the territory of the Russian Federation – the temporary time settings on the computer on which the virus was created correspond to the Moscow and St. Petersburg time zone.
”Russia now seeks to revive its geopolitical greatness, and therefore it is forced to resort to various asymmetric methods, in particular, to go for cyber threats. What has taken place in Ukraine was aimed primarily not against Ukraine, instead it was Russia showing off its capabilities to the West,” Petrov remarked.
”Attacks on the energy companies were a wake-up call for us, but it is even more so for Europe, the countries where information technology is much better developed than in Ukraine. The Russian cyber attack was a demonstration act – to show that they have cyber weapons, which pose a threat to the security of Western countries,” Petrov added.
