Bohdan Lohvynenko on the January 30 Ukraïner cyber attack: "It was destructive"

The website infrastructure of Ukraïner, an educational project about the Ukrainian society and culture, sustained a large-scale, well-planned, three-level DDoS attack which was destructive in nature, Ukraïner founder Bohdan Lohvynenko reports to Institute of Mass Information representative Valentyna Troyan.

He says the attack began in the afternoon and reached its peak between 14:24 and 14:37. During this time, the server was receiving over 358 thousand requests per minute, with the total number of requests amounting to 7.5 million. This caused a critical load on the system and disrupted its operation.

Photo by my-kiev.com

This attack differed from typical DDoS attacks in its complexity and sophistication. The hackers were acting on many levels and did not stop at slowing the website down. They also targeted Ukraїner’s internal systems, imitating legitimate traffic in order to override the defense mechanisms.

The attack involved tens of thousands of IP addresses, which made it difficult to block its sources. The goal was not just to disrupt the website, but to completely disable the entire infrastructure.

The server suffered serious damage due to the excessive load. The disk subsystem was failing, which made restoring operations impossible. The RAID array, which is responsible for saving data, could not be correctly reassembled after the failure and critical sectors of the file system were damaged.

On January 30, 2025, he website of Ukraïner, an educational project about the Ukrainian society and culture, sustained a large-scale DDoS attack.