Handling Internet Activism during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Campus Network Perspective

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This publication doesn't include Faculty of Economics and Administration. It includes Institute of Computer Science. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

HUSÁK Martin LAŠTOVIČKA Martin PLESNÍK Tomáš

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Digital Threats: Research and Practice
MU Faculty or unit

Institute of Computer Science

Citation
Web https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534566
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3534566
Keywords Internet activism;DDoS;incident handling;campus network
Attached files
Description The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 raised an enormous wave of Internet activism and DDoS attacks launched with the help of common users across the world. In this paper, we describe the events of the first days after the invasion from the perspective of the cybersecurity incident response team of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. We observed hundreds of users intentionally participating in DDoS attacks against Russia from the university’s network. The campus network faced only minor issues in terms of service unavailability, but alerts flooded the cybersecurity team. Two dimensions of the events are highlighted. First, the large-scale attacks in an unexpected direction were highly unusual and brought technical challenges in network monitoring and intrusion detection. Second, hacktivism still violates the campus network’s terms of use and requires the cybersecurity team to communicate the issues very carefully with the community.
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