Ukraine's largest private energy company targeted by Russian hacktivists

Ukraine's largest private energy firm DTEK Group, which owns coal and thermal power plants in various parts of Ukraine reported on July 1 that Russian hacktivists launched a major cyberattack in retaliation for its owner's opposition to Russia's war in Ukraine.

DTEK said the goal of the cyber incident was to:

destabilize the technological processes of its distribution and generation firms, spread propaganda about the company's operations, and to leave Ukrainian consumers without electricity.

The actual impact of the incident, and what computer networks were breached, is unclear. There have been no reports of outages caused by the incident. The firm did not respond to requests for comment.

The cuner security incident was discovered days after Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man and DTEK's owner, sued Russia at the European Court of Human Rights for allegedly costing Akhmetov billions of dollars in property rights damages.

A Russian-speaking hacking group known as XakNet claimed to have breached DTEK's networks this week and posted screenshots on the Telegram app of purported DTEK data as proof. The hacking group surfaced in March, according to a US and allied government advisory, and has claimed to target Ukrainian officials in support of Russia's war.

The other day, Norwegian authorities reported a massive attack of Russian hackers which knocked out public and private websites in Norway in the past 24 hours.