The Fancy Lazarus DDoS extortion group demanded a $250,000 ransom from Ukraine’s largest telecoms operator Kyivstar, threatening the company with massive high-volume distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, if the ransom is not paid.
«Kyivstar» — is a Ukrainian telecommunications company that provides communication and data services. As of 2020, Kyivstar became the largest mobile operator and one of the largest broadband Internet providers in Ukraine.
In an interview with Forbes Oleksandr Komarov, the company's president, said that initially the hackers launched a small-scale DDoS attack against Kyivstar that didn’t have a significant impact on the provider’s services.
Fancy Lazarus then contacted Komarov and demanded that the company pay them $250,000, so as to not become a victim of a DDoS attack. The group gave the company two weeks to pay up.
The provider informed Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of the issue and during these two weeks was able to prepare to the attack.
After the company refused to pay the ransom, Fancy Lazarus launched a massive DDoS attack against Kyivstar, which reached a size of 1.5 tbps.
“We have never seen anything like this before, but we withstood [the attack], ” Komarov said.
He added that since the beginning of the Rissia-Ukraine war the company has been a target of cyberattacks on a weekly basis, with 70-80 of them being the large-scale attacks.
In April, Microsoft said that Russian state-backed hackers carried out hundreds of cyberattacks against Ukraine that appeared to support Russia’s military operations and online propaganda.
According to Ukrainian officials, most of cyber incidents involve phishing, malware, and DDoS attacks. Between February 15 and March 30, Ukraine has suffered over 3,000 cyberattacks, with record 275 DDoS attacks during one day. The most powerful of them at their peak exceeded 100Gbps.
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!
