Hackers Claim Attack on Largest Commercial Bank in Ukraine (Green Dragon vs PrivatBank)

A group of hackers called Green Dragon Crew announced on Twitter that the recent cyber-attack on the Privatbank, the largest commercial bank in Ukraine was their doing.

The attack appears to be a distributed denial-of-service since on June 30, for a few hours, the bank’s pages either would not load or offered sporadic access to the customers.

However, the group also claims that they managed to breach the bank’s systems and that they have access to customer bank accounts. In order to do this, they would have to access different systems because payment service and the website are not part of the same infrastructure.

They said that the motivation behind the attack is Igor Kolomoisky’s, the Privatbank owner, sponsoring of acts of war in the South-East region of Ukraine.

According to news outlets in Russia, the bank denied the information about a cyber-attack on its systems, despite the fact that on Monday, the websites could not be accessed from Russia or Ukraine until 3 PM, Moscow time. The Voice of Russia reports that at 6 PM, Moscow time, the Russian site was still unavailable to customers.

Apart from the tweet claiming responsibility for the attack, Green Dragon Crew gave a few statements to Russian media saying that they do not want to cause harm to the bank’s customers, but by keeping the money in the accounts they “co-finance the killings of civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk since Kolomoisky finances the war and profits from it, selling the army fuel at triple prices."

Furthermore, they are offering a grace period, with the deadline on July 4, for the customers to withdraw their money; otherwise, all the funds available are to be directed to humanitarian purposes for the population in the affected region in Ukraine.

There doesn’t seem to be too much information about Green Dragon Crew outside this incident. Their Twitter account appears to have been created for the purpose of claiming the attack and the reason behind it; it hasn’t been used for any other messages.

At the moment, Privatbank is the largest commercial bank in Ukraine and it benefited from a hefty financial aid from the International Monetary Fund and the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance, as part of the Emergency Liquidity Assistance to the country’s banks.

ITAR-TASS news agency informs that Privatbank handles more than 13.6 million accounts of individuals and has 325,000 corporate customers. Since the beginning of the year its capital is $2 billion/€1,461 billion

Igor Kolomoisky,a Billionaire Oligarch that owns PrivatBank, was appointed Governor of Dnipropetrovsk by the coup government, even though he lives in Switzerland.

He has offered bounties for dead separatists, and currently finances at least three of the private, pro-Kiev militias operating in Southeast Ukraine, including the group responsible for both the election day civilian murders, and Mariupol massacre.

An all-around nice guy./s

He was the primary financial sponsor of former President Yulia Tymoshenko, and is closely tied to BOTH George Soros, as well as Peter Omidyar.

The hackers are going after Kolo's biggest operation.

All of what you said, and some much worse things. He has been linked to the Odessa massacre too.

The interesting part about the hacker's attack (cannot happen to a nicer guy) is that even if it is fake, Kolomoisky will take some damage.

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