National emergency in Ukraine after cyber-attacks bring down many websites

Russia on Wednesday allegedly carried out a cyber attack on Ukrainian banks and important websites like defence, foreign and internal security. Ukraine’s Parliament has declared a national emergency in the wake of the cyber attack.

The impact of the attack began on Wednesday afternoon, intensifying in severity over the course of the day.

Ukrainian lawmakers approved President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decree that imposes the measure for 30 days starting Thursday. The state of emergency allows authorities to impose restrictions on movement, block rallies and ban political parties and organisations in the interests of national security and public order.

With the declaration of emergency, Ukraine has asked its 3 million people to leave Russia immediately. Meanwhile, Moscow began evacuating its Kyiv embassy. After websites in Ukraine were hit by denial-of-service attacks on Wednesday, threat of an imminent Russian invasion seems to happen anytime soon.

This is not the first time Ukraine is hit by a cyber attack. Last week, a similar attack took a smaller number of websites in the country offline. Cyber authorities in the UK and the US blamed that attack on Russian hackers under direct orders from the Kremlin. But Moscow has denied all charges.

In January, the Ukrainian government accused Russia of being behind another cyber attack affected about 70 government websites, some replaced with a warning to Ukrainians to ‘prepare for the worst’. On Tuesday, the EU announced a cyber rapid-response team (CRRT) was being deployed across Europe, after a call for help from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the European Union will hold a very important meeting today to decide the strategy against Russia. This meeting will take place in Belarus, which is already with Russia and the Russian army is present on Belarusian soil.