How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

Source Link

Less extortion and theft, but more digital destruction. That is one of the ways in which the conflict in Ukraine is altering cybercrime. The shift, says Oleh Derevianko, chairman of issp, a Ukrainian computer-security firm, is striking. Recent years had seen a boom in the use of ransomware, which scrambles victims’ computer data until a payment is made. Now, Mr Derevianko says, the number of such attacks on issp’s corporate and government clients has dropped pretty-much to zero. Instead, many of those once involved in such enterprises seem to have been co-opted by Russia’s government and are focusing on “wiping” computers to damage Ukraine’s war effort by erasing whatever data they can reach.

The same is true of attacks on Russian computers by Ukrainians, says Olga Khmil, a researcher at Molfar, an intelligence firm in Kyiv. Such hackers now care less about stealing money and “more about the damage they can cause to the aggressor”.