EU countries sending cyber experts to help Ukraine
(Reuters) — Six European Union countries are sending a team of cybersecurity experts to Ukraine to help deal with cyber threats after Russia formally recognized two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, Lithuania's deputy defense minister said Tuesday.
In response to a request from Ukraine on Monday, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Croatia will send the team of experts they set up earlier to help other EU countries, institutions and partners to cope with cyber threats, Deputy Defense Minister Margiris Abukevicius said.
“Ukraine might need help to deal with particular incidents or support to test their infrastructure looking for security weakness,” he told Reuters.
Russian military hackers were behind a spate of distributed denial of service attacks that briefly knocked Ukrainian banking and government websites offline, the United States and the United Kingdom said Friday.
Russia has denied any role in the DDoS, which inflicted relatively limited disruption on Tuesday last week.
U.K. defense minister Ben Wallace said Monday that U.K. cyber experts are working with Ukraine to help to protect it from Russian activity.
