The IPI global network condemns the cyber attack targeting Ukrainian news website Slidstvo.Info. The attack occurred shortly after the publication of an investigation into premium real estate reportedly owned by Ukraine’s minister of agriculture, Vitaly Koval.
On September 23, the website was targeted in a mass cyber attack, the aim of which was likely to bring its website offline, Slidstvo.Info said in a statement published on September 24. The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which attempted to block access to Slidstvo.Info’s website by sending an abnormally high number of access requests.
Slidstvo.info said it believes the attack was linked to its story on Koval. The investigation published documents which showed that Koval’s mother-in-law owns a high-end apartment in Kyiv worth 17.7 million hryvnias despite having no official income which would allow the purchase of such real estate.
Swedish cyber forensics company Qurium, which monitors the security of the Slidstvo.Info website, reported that the attack began on September 23 at 5:00 p.m. (the article on Koval was published one hour earlier) and lasted for about half an hour. Slidstvo.Info’s website continued to operate throughout the attack.
In a statement quoted by Slidstvo.Info, Ester Eriksson, the CEO of Qurium, said that the timing of the attack could “hardly be a coincidence”. Slidstvo.Info director Anna Babinets also said she believed the attack was linked to the recent publication on Minister Koval, quoting reporting by Qurium.
“Cyber attacks, including DDoS attacks which attempt to block the functioning of news websites, have become a new weapon of choice to disrupt media from doing their job and reaching their readers with news and information”, IPI Interim Executive Director Scott Griffen said. “DDoS attacks are all the more dangerous of a threat as they are generally cheap to organize and because it is very difficult to identify the masterminds of such attacks.”
He added: “We call on Ukrainian authorities to investigate the recent cyber attack on Slidstvo.Info, identify those responsible, and hold them to account.”
In the Slidstvo.Info investigation authored by Anna Babinets and journalist Oleksandr Voloshyn, journalists discovered that Koval lives in a 170-square-meter apartment in a premium-segment apartment complex in Kyiv. This apartment technically belongs to his 69-year-old mother-in-law, who did not seem to have had sufficient official income to purchase it, opening the door to the suggestion that the apartment could have been registered in her name in order to conceal potential illicit wealth acquired by the minister.
IPI identified no fewer than 18 major cyber attacks targeting Ukrainian media since January 2024. Ukrainian media have been targeted in more cyber attacks than media in any other country in Europe this year, according to IPI monitoring.
