War in Ukraine: Massive failures on ministry websites, analysis shows the extent

Created: 02/24/2022Updated: 02/24/2022, 23:23

By: Philipp David Pries

In fact, these websites should now be a reliable source of information for all Ukrainians.

But a technical analysis by IPPEN.MEDIA shows that many government websites have been paralyzed.

Russian attacks are probably behind it.

Kiev - Only a simple error message appears in the browser.

Anyone who called up the official websites of Ukrainian ministries on Thursday evening usually ended up in a dead end.

"Page not available" it said or "Access denied".

A technical analysis by IPPEN.MEDIA in the Russia-Ukraine conflict* now shows: Almost half of the ministry pages are technically unavailable or only available to an extremely limited extent.

It started on Wednesday at the latest, but now there are more and more.

This applies, for example, to the Ministry of Youth and Sports in Ukraine as well as the Ministry of the Interior.

This goes hand in hand with numerous reports of cyber attacks by state or state-backed Russian groups.

The websites of many Ukrainian ministries therefore stumble massively on the first day of the war - regardless of which country the websites are accessed from.

We have determined the website status of all 20 Ukrainian ministries that operate a stand-alone website.

And a repeated automated technical check of their availability (for details, see the background box) shows that everything is still working perfectly for about half of them.

But several websites have had to redirect to alternative offers, and a total of eight refuse their service for hours and completely.

Official Ukraine websites are often paralyzed

Our table in this article shows the technical status of all ministry websites as of late Thursday evening.

It turns out that central authorities such as the Ministry of the Interior or Defense can no longer be reached.

This is particularly critical given the current threat situation, in which the people of Ukraine depend on reliable information that is free of social media propaganda.

In individual cases, however, it is conceivable that increased use by a large number of users in Ukraine can lead to temporary failures.

In principle, it has long been part of war strategies to cut off the population from relevant information on websites and to spread propaganda at the same time.

Russia has used this on several occasions before.

On Thursday evening, reports of outright attacks on Ukrainian websites began to pile up.

These so-called "Distributed Denial-of-Service" (DDoS) attacks are carried out in a bundle and overwhelm the web server by making mass requests.

One of the websites was even affected by Cloudflare - a service from Amazon that is usually known for its high level of robustness.

There are also reports of so-called wipers that cause massive damage and deletions on web servers.

Ukraine War: Massive failures on Ukrainian ministry websites.

© Screenshot IPPEN.MEDIA/Pries

Attack on official websites in Ukraine: often part of warfare

The analysis thus shows that, in addition to the war at sea, land and air, the war in cyberspace has also long since begun.

This is initially less visible, but can indirectly cause just as much damage.

The Ukrainian side also sees Russia as an attacker here: "Another massive DDos attack on our state began," wrote Ukraine's Minister for Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, on Telegram.

And he's probably lucky that his ministry's website was available at least on Thursday evening - unlike many others.

Our data, sources and methods

The basis for the technical analysis was the official list of all Ukrainian ministries.

We then determined those pages that have their own website.

We then automatically checked all URLs with a so-called HTTP status check - the website reports back its current status.

So "200" means smooth functioning, while "503" stands for serious problems.

For example, we classified all websites as disturbed that repeatedly returned status codes with 5xx over a long period of time or were unusable for the user.

At the same time, we have made sure that the status code queries cannot lead to impairment of the websites.