Ukraine says it foiled 2nd cyberattack after police raid

Ukraine has blamed the Kremlin for the attacked that sowed chaos. Kremlin officials routinely deny claims of electronic interference in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The raid on M.E. Doc caps a week of increasingly implausible claims from the company that it was not at the heart of the outbreak. On Wednesday the firm reversed itself, acknowledging that it had been broken into and used by hackers to seed the malware epidemic.

It’s not clear what the thrust or scope of the second cyberattack in Ukraine was, but M.E. Doc is widely used across Ukraine, making it a tempting springboard for hackers. An executive at the company was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine as saying the software was installed on 1 million machines across the country.

How many of those machines have been infected is an open question.

The June 27 attack initially seemed to be a particularly aggressive form of ransomware, but many analysts who picked it apart later said it appeared to be a thinly disguised attempt to destroy data and sow chaos. Some said the malware epidemic was likely state-backed, and Ukrainian officials have squarely put the blame on the Kremlin.

In the meantime, the online wallet carrying roughly $10,000 worth of digital currency extorted by the cyber attackers was emptied shortly around the time of the July 4 raid, according to Bitcoin’s public ledger. Information security experts say some of the money appears to have been used to purchase space on a darknet text storage site, where a statement demanding 100 bitcoin, or roughly $260,000, in exchange for unscrambling all the affected files materialized around the same time.

It was difficult to determine whether the offer was serious or just a distraction and The Associated Press was unable to immediately reach the hackers for comment.

Ukrainian officials have not offered a global estimate of the amount of damage inflicted by the June 27 attack. But in an interview Tuesday with the Associated Press, Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said the damage at his department alone ran into the millions of dollars.

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This story has been corrected to show that the purported hackers have demanded 100 bitcoin, not 100,000 bitcoin.

Raphael Satter, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Ukraine says it foiled 2nd cyberattack after police raid

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