Organizations are urged to take steps to build their cybersecurity resilience due to ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) issued the warning after recent cyber attacks on Ukraine and tensions in the region.
Patterns similar to previous cyberattacks
Although the attacks have not been officially attributed to anyone, the NCSC notes that they follow similar patterns to previous incidents, some of which have been blamed on the Russian government by the UK, US and other countries.
These include the cyberattacks on Georgia, as well as the NotPetya cyberattack. NotPetya was designed to target organizations in Ukraine’s financial, energy and government sectors, but the nature of the attack meant that it impacted organizations around the world, causing damage estimated at billions of dollars.
NotPetya was powered by EternalBlue, an offensive NSA hacking tool that was leaked in early 2017. At the time of the NotPetya attack in June of that year, a security patch had been available for decades. months, but many organizations had not yet implemented it.
EternalBlue
And this, despite a demonstration of the vulnerability of a large number of systems to attacks based on EternalBlue. This demonstration took place when North Korea launched the WannaCry ransomware in May 2017, disrupting the networks of organizations around the world.
Regular patching of software and operating systems is therefore one of the actions that organizations are encouraged to implement to help protect their networks against cyberattacks.
Other steps organizations are encouraged to take include enabling multi-factor authentication, having an incident response plan in place, and regularly testing backups and other online defenses to ensure that they work as expected.
Stay informed
Organizations are also recommended to keep up to date with the latest threat information and available mitigations, in order to be aware of potential incidents.
“While we are not aware of any specific threats to UK organizations in relation to events in Ukraine, we are monitoring the situation closely and it is essential that organizations follow the advice to ensure they are resilient,” warns Paul Chichester, director of operations at NCSC.
“For several years, we have observed a pattern of malicious Russian behavior in cyberspace. The incidents of the past week in Ukraine bear the marks of similar Russian activity that we have seen before,” he adds.
Source: ZDNet.com