The Ukrainian public operator of nuclear power plants Energoatom denounced this Tuesday in a press release an “unprecedented” Russian cyberattack against its site, specifying that its operation had not been interrupted.
“On August 16, 2022, the most powerful cyberattack since the beginning of the Russian invasion against the official Energoatom website took place,” the operator said on Telegram. The site “was attacked from Russian territory,” she added.
The Russian group “People’s Cyber Army” used 7.25 million Internet robots that attacked the Energoatom site for three hours, the Ukrainian company assured, according to which this hacking attempt “did not have a considerable impact on the work of the Energoatom site”. .
The Telegram channel called “People’s Cyber Army” in Russian called on its followers at noon to attack the Energoatom site. In the evening, he announced a “change”, now targeting the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, whose site was encountering difficulties.
Tensions around the Zaporizhia power plant
These attacks come amid tension around the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporijjia, located in the south of the country and occupied by Russian troops since March, shortly after Moscow launched the invasion of its neighbor. Several attacks that Moscow and Kyiv accuse each other of have targeted this facility, the largest in Europe, raising fears of a nuclear disaster.
Ukraine has four nuclear power plants that, before the invasion, provided about half of the electricity production of this vast country, located on the border with the European Union.
Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, had already been the scene of the worst nuclear disaster in history in 1986, when a reactor at its Chernobyl power plant (north) exploded, contaminating much of Europe.
Kyiv shut down Chernobyl’s last operational reactor in 2000. After the invasion began last February, Russian troops seized the facility and the highly radioactive area around it for several weeks within a 30-kilometre radius.
Source: BFM TV
