РНБОУ National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine

The NCCC at the NSDC: Almost 14 million cybersecurity incidents have already been recorded in Ukraine in 2021

No large-scale cyber threats have been recorded in Ukraine. At the same time, the global trend over the last month shows an increase in cases of phishing and sales of large databases.

In such a way, most attacks in Ukraine were aimed at the public sector, which is more than 75% of all attacks. In total, the largest number of incidents during the month was related to unauthorized access to computer systems (70% of cases), resource scanning (10% of cases) and brute-force attacks (7% of cases).

In addition, phishing attacks can be singled out, more than 400 thousand cases of which have been recorded.

In particular, at the beginning of the year, experts revealed a mass distribution of phishing emails to government agencies, allegedly from the Administration of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine. The letters were sent from an e-mail box, the domain of which looked like the real domain name of the SSSCIP Administration. The file contained in these emails gave the attackers access to remote control over the affected computer. That is, the person who gained access had the opportunity to destroy, copy, modify the data contained on the affected computers. The incident was reported to all departments to which phishing emails were sent. In most cases, the negative consequences were prevented by the prompt response to the NCCC's messages, but in some institutions, attackers still managed to achieve their goal and gain access to the affected computers.

It bears reminding that in September 2020, experts of the National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity at the NSDC of Ukraine began to work on drafting the Cybersecurity Strategy of Ukraine.