Millions of companies across Britain were today warned to prepare for a Russian cyber attack as the UK placed sanctions on three wealthy allies of Vladimir Putin and five banks in response to the ‘renewed invasion’ of Ukraine.
GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) urged UK organisations to ‘bolster their online defences’ and warned that there has been an ‘historical pattern of cyber attacks on Ukraine with international consequences’.
Ukrainian banking and government websites were last week briefly knocked offline by a spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which the US and Britain said were carried out by Russian military hackers – something the Russians denied. This will prompt concerns that the same sort of attack could now be attempted in the UK.
DDoS attacks try to crash a website by bombarding it with superfluous requests at the same time – and this surge of simple requests overloads the servers, causing them to shut down. In order to leverage the number of requests necessary, hackers will often resort to botnets – networks of computers brought under their control with malware.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace also said the UK will launch retaliatory cyber attacks on Russia if it targets Britain’s computer networks, and that ‘offensive cyber capability’ was being developed from a base in North West England.
It comes after Home Secretary Priti Patel warned over the weekend that the UK Government expects to see ‘cyber attacks aimed at the West’, while NCSC chief executive Lindy Cameron told of a ‘heightened cyber threat’.
And in recent weeks the Financial Conduct Authority watchdog has written to the chief executives of UK banks warning them to brace for Russian-sponsored cyber attacks and to ensure their security systems are updated.
