Filenews 25 February 2022 - by Angelos Nikolaou
An international cybersecurity company is implicating a Cypriot company in the electronic warfare that computers received in Ukraine a few hours before the Russian invasion. This Nicosia-based company is presented to the Registrar of Companies to belong to a single person (director and secretary), while the contact number is dead. We asked for information from the Police who spoke of "disinformation", while the Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, who is in Dubai, did not have an update on the issue.
According to international reports, the malware designed to delete data was activated on hundreds of computers in Ukraine. The virus, which is suspected of being directed at Russia's military hackers, appears to have been created weeks earlier. It even contained a deceptive digital software authenticity, which corresponds to a company in Cyprus, which according to the Police who contacted it seems to have nothing to do with it.
The hitherto unknown malware, called the Hermetic Wiper, was spotted by Slovenian cybersecurity firm ESET at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Kiev time. The timestamp it contains shows that it was created on December 28, 2021, an indication that the cyberattack was pre-planned, according to the company.
ESET said the virus had by then settled on "hundreds of computers," but cybersecurity firm Symantec later reported that the attack was spreading widely. Experts are now rushing to examine the code of the virus, which has been posted on Alphabet's VirusTotal service. The company's researchers found that the virus carries a digital certificate that had been attributed to a Cypriot company, whose name was given to the software.
Ukraine's State Agency for Special Communications and Information Protection said cyberattacks on websites reported on Wednesday followed cyberattacks that hit Ukrainian government websites on February 15th. The White House blamed the Russian Military Intelligence Agency (GRU) for these attacks, which are known as denial-of-provision of distribution services (DDoS) attacks, for flooding computer servers with false traffic and shutting down the websites.
Of all the cyber incidents, however, the destructive data deletion tool—known as the "wiper" malware—has had the potential to have the biggest impact. The wiper usually deletes data from computers and renders it non-functional. This has the potential to paralyze organizations that try to stay connected during a conflict.
