PRESS RELEASE : The creation of a cyber security infrastructure made it possible to protect Ukrainian web resources and databases from Russian attacks – Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a conversation with American business leaders [September 2022]
The press release issued by the President of Ukraine on 6 September 2022.
Thanks to the professionalism of Ukrainian IT specialists and the help of foreign partners, in particular companies such as Amazon, Ukrainian web resources and databases were protected from powerful attacks carried out from the territory of the Russian Federation and Belarus in the first days of the full-scale invasion. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this during an online conversation with the heads of large American businesses within the opening of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
“Saving our data, protecting data – of both government bodies and private companies – was a very important fundamental step,” he said.
The Head of State noted that after the start of the full-scale war, even those Ukrainian websites that were subjected to the most powerful cyber attacks endured, in particular the portal of the National Bank, the websites of the ministries and the Office of the President of Ukraine. Data on the supply of weapons was also protected.
As Volodymyr Zelenskyy emphasized, this became possible thanks to the construction of cyber security infrastructure, which was a priority from the beginning of his presidency, as Ukraine had to protect itself from Russian cyber attacks.
“That’s why we created the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. And in every state institution, in every ministry, regardless of what it does, a management vertical is built today, where there is a special CEO, a deputy for digitization. And this network, which we built, worked,” the President said.
He noted that the best IT specialists from the market were integrated into the state structure. And to pay them market related salaries, various grant programs were used.
The Head of State also expressed his belief that investments in Ukraine are beneficial both for big business and for our country, as new jobs will appear in Ukraine, and business will get excellent results thanks to smart and professional Ukrainian specialists.
“Our people are free, creative, they invest their intellect in startups,” he noted.
On the eve of the war, the Ukrainian side decided on the possibility of temporary storage of data abroad, and the Amazon company was the first to react to the full-scale invasion and offered Ukraine an unlimited and free service for storing state registers. In the first weeks of the war, 36 Ukrainian authorities transferred more than 60 of their critical registers and systems to Amazon resources, including the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Health, ProZorro systems, the All-Ukrainian online school, etc. In this way, Amazon made it possible to create a reliable backup infrastructure for Ukraine.
On the 6th day of the war, March 1, a Russian missile hit the National Data Backup Center in downtown Kyiv. Backup copies of state registers are stored there. But not a single basic register and not a single critical state service was stopped, and the state worked stably and quickly responded to the challenges of the war. In this way, the functioning of the state avoided the physical and virtual attack of the aggressor.
