According to the recent findings by Atlas VPN, 89% of cyber-attacks worldwide are targeting Russia and Ukraine.

A significant amount of these cyber-attacks are being directed at financial services businesses with Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks making up 90% of all cyber-attacks.

On the 5th of March alone, a total of 5 billion attacks were launched on Russia – making up 70% of all recorded cyber-attacks, with Anonymous hackers declaring a full-on cyberwar on the country. As of now, they have leaked government employee data and hacked Russian state TV channels.

Threat actors targeted Ukraine in the remaining 19% of cyber-attacks. Just days before the war in Ukraine, Russian hackers brought down the websites of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and the two largest banks with DDoS attacks.

Cyber-attacks targeting the United States made up 5% of all threats worldwide.

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Cybersecurity writer at Atlas VPN Vilius Kardelis shares his thoughts on cyber-attacks against Russia and Ukraine: “Cyberwarfare is becoming a reality as attacks are used to disrupt essential services.

“Hackers took control of banking, government, military websites, even TV channels to damage the usual operations of these entities. The battles in the digital world can have a significant impact on communications and propaganda distribution on both sides.”

DDoS attacks disrupt financial services

DDoS attacks were the most widely used cyber-attacks targeting Russia or Ukraine by a large margin. DDoS attacks cause the victims’ service disruption by flooding IT infrastructure with more requests per second than the system can process.

The financial services sector stands out when looking at the most attacked industries. Banks and other payment processing companies suffered from 72% of cyber-attacks worldwide.

Cybercriminals chose the business industry as their target in 21% of attacks. The computing and IT sector suffered from 2% of cyber-attacks globally. All other industries accounted for 5% of attacks.

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