Authorities in the United States said they broke up a potential digital attack called VPNFilter that affected half a million internet routers and could have caused widespread havoc in Ukraine. The US Justice Department said this was the most recent attack programmed by the Sofacy Group, the Russian hackers — also known as Fancy Bear — are suspected of being behind cyber attacks on several governments, international agencies and infrastructure providers.
The largest number of infections was in Ukraine but affected routers in 54 countries, according to technology company Cisco Systems and antivirus company Symantec, which cooperated with the FBI during the operation.
The FBI seized the domain toknowall.com and directed all traffic to it to a server configured by investigators, court documents said.
Hackers could have rendered the routers unusable, which would have left hundreds of thousands of people without internet access.
The VPNFilter attack could have put hundreds of thousands of people offline
The Justice Department said the malware "could be used for a variety of malicious purposes, including intelligence gathering, theft of valuable information, destructive or disruptive attacks, and the misattribution of such activities."
While investigators said the hackers' motives remain unclear, Ukraine's SBU state security service said the potential cyber attack showed Russia was readying a large-scale disruption of a "large-scale event" in Ukraine, such as the Champions League soccer final, due to be held in Kyiv on Saturday, or upcoming Constitution Day celebrations in late June.
Moscow denied having a role in developing the hack. "Russia has not been planning a hacker attack using routers," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
