Some Ukrainian websites temporarily knocked offline by cyberattack

Several key Ukrainian websites, including those of two of the country’s largest banks and its defense ministry, were temporarily knocked offline Tuesday after an apparent cyberattack.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attacks.

Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications, a government-funded organization aimed at countering disinformation, said in a Facebook post that the websites of PrivatBank and Oscadbank were knocked offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. DDoS attacks flood websites with traffic in an effort to disrupt their operations or knock them offline. The public website for the armed forces of Ukraine was also knocked offline.

The attacks corresponded with what Ukraine's Cyber Police called an “information attack,” where Ukrainian citizens received spam text messages that ATMs were down. It's not clear how many people received the texts or if the DDoS also took any Ukrainian ATMs offline.