Ukraine has hit Russia's biggest marketplace in cyberspace as well as with drones. Cyber specialists disrupted Wildberries' operations across Russia, Ukraine's Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) reports.
Ukraine says that Wildberries is not ordinary commerce but a piece of Russia's war logistics. According to the military command, the network moves military-related goods, and President Zelenskyy has said Russia uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone components, which is why Ukraine has spent weeks burning its warehouses and now strikes its servers.
HUR reports that on 10 and 11 August, specialists from the Cyber Corps community attacked Wildberries' digital infrastructure, causing failures in its payment and customer service systems.
The attack hit payments and support
The disruption struck where customers feel it. Because of the problems with the payment infrastructure, users complained they could not complete certain transactions.
For a platform whose whole value is the frictionless movement of goods and money, a payment system that will not process transactions is a direct hit to the business.
The strain spread to customer service. At the same time, the load on the support service rose, causing failures in the contact centers, so the attack degraded both the ability to pay and the ability to get help across Russia.
It pairs with the warehouse strikes
In July, Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses, about 15.4% of the marketplace's storage.
Pairing strikes on physical infrastructure with Ukrainian cyber operations strengthens the pressure on the company, HUR assessed.
The logic is to squeeze the same target from two directions at once: burn the warehouses that store the goods, then disable the systems that move them to customers, so damage in one domain amplifies damage in the other.
Earlier, Ukraine hit the Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara, which builds Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet, Russia’s planned alternative to Starlink.
