White House: Russia behind Ukraine hack

The Biden administration believes Russian government hackers were behind cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense and banks in Ukraine earlier this week, a top White House official said Friday.

White House deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger told reporters the U.S. believes that hackers working with Russia’s military intelligence directorate, or GRU, are responsible for distributed denial-of-service attacks reported in Ukraine this week.

Neuberger said the Biden administration has “technical information” linking the attacks to the GRU and the U.S. shared underlying intelligence supporting the attribution with Ukraine.

“We have assessed that Russia was responsible for the distributed denial-of-service attacks that occurred earlier this week,” Neuberger said.

Neuberger added that the U.S. worked to attribute the attacks quickly because of the need to call Russia out for its behavior.