The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) today said the country is the target of an ongoing “wave of hybrid warfare,” aiming to instill anxiety and undermine Ukrainian society’s confidence in the state’s ability to defend its citizens.
“Ukraine is facing attempts to systemically sow panic, spread fake information and distort the real state of affairs. All this combined is nothing more than another massive wave of hybrid warfare,” the SSU said.
The SSU added that it had to counteract multiple such attempts linked to hostile intelligence agencies and bot farms targeting both social networks and mass media.
“The SSU is seeing such manifestations of hybrid warfare in social networks, some mass media, in the spread of narratives of the aggressor state by certain politicians, etc. The SSU is not just observing these, but also actively counteracting to them,” the Ukrainian Security Service added.
“This is reflected in the NSDC decisions, number of neutralized cyberattacks, dismantling of numerous bot farms, exposing agent networks of hostile intelligence services and preventing sabotage and terrorist attacks.”
One day later, the SSU said it blocked over 120 cyberattacks targeting the information systems of Ukrainian state institutions throughout January 2022.
Redmond security and threat researchers added that Gamaredon’s ongoing cyber-espionage campaign is coordinated out of Crimea, confirming SSU’s assessment that these state-backed hackers are officers of the Crimean FSB known to have sided with the Russian occupation during the 2014 occupation.