Ukraine‘s military intelligence agency, the GUR, has reportedly carried out a successful cyberattack against the online services of Russia’s ruling United Russia party. The attack, which took place late last week, targeted the party’s servers, websites, and domains, rendering the digital platforms partially inaccessible. According to a source within the spy agency, the attack was executed as part of Ukraine’s ongoing cyber warfare activities against Russian digital infrastructure, a detail that was confirmed by multiple Ukrainian media outlets.
In response, United Russia acknowledged on its official Telegram channel that it experienced “massive” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on all of its services. However, the party assured that its critical digital infrastructure had remained operational despite the attacks. It’s rare for Kremlin-aligned organizations to admit to such incidents, which underscores the severity of the attack. DDoS attacks work by flooding the target with an overwhelming volume of internet traffic to disrupt normal operations.
The timing of the cyberattack coincided with Russia’s “Victory Dictation” event, a patriotic online initiative where participants across Russia and in 60 other countries take a test on Russian history. Russian state officials interpreted the timing of the cyberattacks as an attempt by enemies to undermine efforts to preserve what they call “historical truth” about the Great Patriotic War, known elsewhere as World War II. United Russia claimed that these actions were aimed at preventing people from expressing respect for the memory of the war.
Furthermore, over the same weekend, the GUR, in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group BO Team, launched an additional cyberattack on a subsidiary of MTS, one of Russia’s major telecom providers. BO Team claimed to have destroyed the company’s software and configuration files, which caused severe disruptions to internet services across various parts of Russia, including major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. These consecutive attacks highlight the expanding scope of cyber warfare tactics being employed by Ukraine in the conflict with Russia. As with many such cyberattacks, verifying the details and extent of the impact is challenging due to the secretive nature of such operations and the limited amount of information released by the affected parties.
