Ukrainians hackers target Russian vodka

Ukrainian hackers disrupted alcohol shipments in Russia after committing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against a critical online portal.

Alcohol producers and distributors are required by law to register their shipments with the EGAIS portal, loosely translated as the "Unified State Automated Alcohol Accounting Information System."

Several entities in the sector told local news site Vedomosti this week that DDoS attacks by Ukrainian hackers downed the website on May 2 and 3.

The outage impacted not only vodka distribution but also wine firm and purveyors of other types of alcohol.

Government sources quoted in the report claim that the website is running normally and any excessive waiting times are merely due to heavy demand.

However, one firm, Fort, had failed to upload about 70% of invoices to EGAIS due to the outage, according to the report. Its supplies of wine to retail chains and restaurants were apparently disrupted on May 4 due to the incident.

Although delays are likely only to be temporary, the cyberattack forced one company to stop shipments for a day as warehouses overflowed with products unable to be moved to distribution centers.

According to the report, the domains egais.ru, service.egais.ru and check.egais.ru were listed on the Ukrainian “IT army” Telegram channel.

This is a hacktivist effort coordinated by the Ukrainian government, whereby prominent Russian sites are listed as targets and volunteers are urged to DDoS them.

Recently, Anonymous hacker group targeted Russian companies and financial organizations and reported it successfully hacked Gazprom and leaked 768,000 emails.