KIEV: In the midst of rising tensions with Russia, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense suffered a severe cyber attack that blocked users from accessing its website. According to the authorities, two Ukrainian banks have also lost access to online financial services.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was launched against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense's website, according to the ministry. "DDoS was most likely used to attack the website, as an unusually high number of requests per second were logged. Technical effort on restoring normal operation is being carried out. Communication using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter "Late Tuesday, the ministry sent out a tweet.

The DDoS attack sends many requests to the targeted web resource in order to overwhelm the website's capacity to handle multiple requests and prevent it from working properly. A DDoS attack also knocked ATMs out of service at two banks.  PrivatBank was hit by a "large DDoS attack," according to the Ukrainian government's Center for Strategic Communications, which disrupted numerous online banking services, including payments and balance enquiries.

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