Moscow: Russia not only using physical battlefield attacks against Ukraine, it has also launched state-sponsored cyberattacks.

Western authorities have raised concerns about the cyber-attacks of Russia. The Ukraine government has confirmed cyberattacks of Russia said that it was on a completely different level.

“A new wiper attack, which destroys data on infected machines, was discovered being used against Ukrainian organisations”, BBC reported.

The incident represents the third wave of attacks against Ukraine this year, and the most sophisticated, cyber experts stated.

The latest attack began on Wednesday afternoon when internet connectivity company NetBlocks tweeted about the outages, saying "the incident appears consistent with recent DDoS attacks".

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are designed to knock a website offline by flooding it with huge amounts of requests until it crashes, BBC stated.

"Ukraine's military and banking websites have seen a more rapid recovery, likely due to preparedness and increased capacity to implement mitigations." The researcher said, BBC quoted.

The US has already issued an alert to Ukraine on February 16. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned companies that provide services to US armed forces to be on the lookout for an increased number of attempts to break into their IT systems.

Ukraine seeks the help of hackers: Meanwhile, the Ukraine government seeking for its citizens from the country’s hacker underground to help protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber spying missions against Russian troops, according to two people involved in the project, the Guardian reported.

Since the Russian forces attacked cities across Ukraine, Ukraine's requests for volunteers began to appear on hacker forums on Thursday morning, as many residents fled the capital Kyiv.

“Ukrainian cybercommunity! It’s time to get involved in the cyber defence of our country,” the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to apply to Google docs, listing their specialities, such as malware development, and professional references.

 Yegor Aushev, the co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he wrote the post at the request of a senior Defense Ministry official who contacted him on Thursday. Aushev’s firm Cyber Unit Technologies is known for working with Ukraine’s government on the defence of critical infrastructure, the Guardian stated.

Russia unleashed data-wiper malware on Ukraine, say, cyber experts. The Ukraine Defense Ministry representatives did not respond to a request for comment. A defence attache at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington said he “cannot confirm or deny information from Telegram channels” referring to the mobile messaging platform, and declined further comment.

Aushev said the volunteers would be divided into defensive and offensive cyber units. The defensive unit would be employed to defend infrastructures such as power plants and water systems. In a 2015 cyber-attack, widely attributed to Russian state hackers, 225,000 Ukrainians lost electricity.

A Ukrainian security official said earlier this month that the country had no dedicated military cyber force, the Washington Post reported. “It’s our task to create them this year,” he told the Washington Post.

Reached late Thursday night in Ukraine, Aushev said he already had received hundreds of applicants and was going to begin vetting to ensure that none of them was Russian agents.