The website of Ukraïner, an educational project about Ukrainian society and culture, has sustained a large-scale DDoS attack. It is currently inaccessible, founder Bohdan Lohvynenko reported on Facebook.

“The Ukraïner website has been under a large-scale DDoS attack for the past two hours. How unexpected,” he noted.

In a comment to the Institute of Mass Information representative Valentyna Troyan, Bohdan Lohvynenko said that they did not yet know who was behind the attack. He later added that the website infrastructure of Ukraïner sustained a large-scale, well-planned, three-level DDoS attack which was destructive in nature.

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. This attack was different 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.

Ukraїner has been hacked previously: cyber criminals took over the project’s Facebook pages in February 2023. The project’s founder, Bohdan Lohvynenko, reported that hackers had gained access to the media outlet’s pages by hacking the Meta Business Manager. Facebook later restored access to all 12 pages of the project.

Bohdan Lohvynenko said in a comment to the IMI that he did not rule out Russian involvement in the attack on the project’s pages.