What distributed denial of service attack means - Russia's hybrid warfare

To defeat Ukraine and bring it to the knees, Russia does not need to launch a full ground attack against it. To devastate the lives of the people living there, Russia has a range of what are called 'hybrid warfare'. You will be surprised to know that in 2014, Russia took away Crimea from Ukraine with hardly a shot being fired. 

Soon after, in eastern Ukraine, a motley collection of armed thugs and Russian forces took over enclaves in the region of Donbas in the name of independence. But one warfare that Russia often uses against its enemy, Ukraine, is the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

In January this year, the Ukrainian government accused Russia of being behind another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that affected about 70 government websites, some replaced with a warning to Ukrainians to 'prepare for the worst'. However, access to most of the sites was restored within hours. 

Last week, a similar attack took a number of websites in Ukraine offline. A cyberattack aimed at paralyzing banks and government websites was the worst of its kind in Ukrainian history, officials in Kyiv said. The DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attack began last Tuesday and continued into Wednesday with the goal of causing mass confusion, said Ukraine's digital transformation minister.

But it did not stop there. Russia, on Wednesday, allegedly carried out a cyber attack on Ukrainian banks and important websites like defence, foreign and internal security after which Ukraine's Parliament declared a national emergency.

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

What is Russia's hybrid warfare

On Tuesday, the EU announced a cyber rapid-response team (CRRT) was being deployed across Europe.

It is not known if the team of experts from six volunteer countries is helping to defend against this latest attack.

DDoS attacks have been used in various campaigns as a part of Russia's so-called 'hybrid warfare' tactics.

Russia's so-called 'hybrid warfare' is a combination of cyber-attacks with traditional military warfare.

DDoS attacks by Russia hit Georgia and Crimea during the incursions in 2008 and 2014 respectively.

EU, UK, Ukraine blamed Russian government hackers for attacks on electricity substations in 2015 and 2016.

These attacks on electricity substations had then caused widespread power cuts across Ukraine.