Ukraine says Russian hackers getting ready for a large, co-ordinated strike
The pattern of the malware suggests the hackers want to activate it on a particular day, and the scale shows ‘support on a government level — very expensive and very synchronised’
Kiev — Hackers from Russia are infecting Ukrainian companies with malware to create so-called "back doors" for a large co-ordinated attack, Ukraine’s cyber-police chief told Reuters on Tuesday, almost a year after a strike on Ukraine spread around the world. Affected companies range across various industries, such as banks to energy infrastructure. The pattern of the malware being rolled out suggests the people behind it want to activate it on a particular day, Serhiy Demedyuk said, adding that his staff were co-operating with foreign agencies to track the hackers, without naming the agencies. Police had identified viruses designed to hit Ukraine since the start of the year, including phishing e-mails sent from legitimate domains of state institutions whose systems were hacked, or a fake webpage mimicking that of a real state body. They had intercepted hackers sending malware from different sources and broken into various components so as to remain undetected by anti-virus software ...
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