Official Website of UGCC Hit by DDoS Attacks from Russia

The spokesman for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), Fr. Ihor Yatsiv, announced that the official website of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was hit by DDoS attacks. The priest said ironically that the church has thus received another “honor” from its adversaries. Fr. Ihor Yatsiv wrote about this on his Facebook page.

“We have received yet another ‘honor.’ The resources of the UGCC have been hit by DDoS attacks. Our sites are not available. There were 6,000 concurrent external communications requests,” he said.

In a comment to RISU, the priest said that the first attack on the site took place last night from six locations with one thousand external communications requests from each one. Then the UGCC IT staff set up protection so that no more than 50 requests came from one location. And the site started working again.

But during the night the attacks resumed – they occurred from a much larger number of locations. And this morning DDoS attacks exceeded the evening attacks by ten times and at 10:00 the main web portal of the UGCC was again unavailable. All attacks, as reported in the UGCC Department of Information come from Rostelecom – the national telecommunications company in Russia.

Recall that on Christmas Eve, January 6, the Greek Catholic leadership received an official letter from the Ministry of Culture, which warned the church of dissolution if it continued to maintain a presence on the Maidan.

In response to the letter, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk said that the church is not part of the political process, but it “cannot stand by when its faithful ask for spiritual care,” and therefore it is present on the Maidan.