DDoS Before Politics: Ukraine

Cross disciplinary discussion is always fun, right? My sister is an interpretor in Russia and follows the politics of the region much more closely than I do. She recently forwarded me this article which I found very interesting (ignore the technical mistakes in the article). I sent her a link to the Digital Attack Map and she pointed out that a number of key political events in recent history were preceded a day or two by a DDoS attack.

Now that's an interesting proposition. Let's take a closer look. For sources, I'm using the digital attack map and this article by the BBC

There were two DDoS attacks hitting Ukraine from unknown sources on December 7th.

My BBC article shows a large attack taking place on December 8th.

There are no major DDoS attacks hitting Ukraine for a while, but then there's one on January 26th.

And the BBC shows some unrest on the 28-29

There was a lot of DDoS activity detected on February 17th:

And a significant number of protests on the 18th and 19th

There was activity on February 25th

And then a lot of political activity February 23rd - 28th.

Obviously three occurrences is not proof. It's also not clear that these DDoS attacks are significantly higher than attacks going on anywhere else in the world with no such corresponding political unrest. But it is interesting to correlate internet attacks with real world happenings.