As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, hackers are continuing their attempts to compromise phones of Ukrainian officials, said Victor Zhora, the deputy head of Ukraine's State Special Communications Service (SSSCIP).
“We see a lot of attempts to hack Ukrainian officials' phones, mainly with the spreading of malware,” he told journalists at an online news conference meant to mark the 100 days since the start of the war.
According to Zhora, the SSSCIP had not seen any evidence that Ukrainian officials’ devices were compromised so far.
Over the past few years, the world has seen multiple hacking scandals involving the use of spyware (like Pegasus) to spy on politicians, journalists, lawyers, and political activists. These attacks typically involve zero-click exploits that allow to install spyware on the victim’s phone without interaction from the victim.
Zhora said he and his colleagues were aware of the threat of zero-click intrusions but declined to comment on whether they knew of any such attempts against their own devices, Reuters reported.
“We continue monitoring this,” he said.
Last week, the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) warned of a malicious campaign that exploited two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities in order to infect networks belonging to Ukrainian government agencies with the Cobalt Strike Beacon malware.
Cybersecurity Help statement on the critical situation in Ukraine
On February 24, people in many cities and towns across Ukraine woke up to the sounds of explosions and artillery fire, as the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of the country. Such actions are unacceptable, political ambitions of any man aren’t worth of blood, tears, and destruction of millions of lives. We give our full support to the Ukrainian people in these hard times. No more war! Слава Україні!