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The incident occurred as anti-Semitic slogans appear on Jewish community buildings in a different Ukrainian city

Unidentified individuals hurled a firebomb at a synagogue in Lviv and, in a separate incident, wrote anti-Semitic slogans on another Jewish community building in the western Ukrainian city.

The incident involving a firebomb occurred on June 30 but was discovered only Monday, according to the Strana news site. The perpetrators may have aimed the firebomb at a window of the synagogue on Mikhovsky Street but missed it, hitting the building facade, the director of the Chesed-Arieh Jewish group, Ada Dianova,toldStrana.

The contents of the firebomb fell to the foot of the building and burned there, resulting in no damage to the interior, she added. No one was hurt in the incident.

The anti-Semitic slogans painted on a former building of the community on Sholem Aleichem Street included the words Down with Jewish power and: Jews, remember July 1, an apparent reference to a pogrom that took place in Lviv on that date in 1941.

In recent days, Jewish groups in Ukraine and abroad protested the municipalitys sponsoring of a celebration of Roman Shukhevych, a collaborator with the Nazis whose troops perpetrated the July 1 pogroms.

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In Ukraine, many people admire Shukhevych because he fought Russian domination, alongside the Germans, before his UPA militia group turned also against the Germans.

Shortly before the celebration, titled Shukhevychfest and held on the nationalists 110th birthday, city officials in Lviv published online security camera footage of vandals painting Nazi symbols on a Holocaust memorial in a bid to identify them.

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Unidentified Individuals Hurl Firebomb at Ukraine Synagogue - Haaretz

The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague says that it has jurisdiction and will hear the case of a Ukrainian company seeking to recover damages for property lost when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

PJSC Ukrnafta, one of Ukraine's largest oil and gas companies, launched the case and is seeking damages for expropriated gas stations.

The Hague-based court ruled on July 4 that the case was covered by a 1998 bilateral investment treaty between Ukraine and Russia that was meant to encourage economic cooperation and expansion.

In a related decision, the court said it would also hear claims brought against Russia by Stabil LLC and 10 other companies.

An attorney who filed the cases for the Ukrainian firms, John Townshend, said the private gas stations and Ukrnafta made "the same claim that by April 2104, thugs organized by the Russian Federation seized the administrative office" that ran the firms and "took the stations, took the cash, took the petrol [gasoline], [and] kicked our people out."

Russia previously told the court that it had no authority to form an arbitral tribunal to settle the claims and that Russia did not consent to participate in arbitration proceedings.

But the court ruled that the bilateral investment treaty permitted investors of one country whose property has been appropriated by the other country to launch private arbitration proceedings.

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Hague Court Will Hear Case Brought By Ukrainian Firms Against Russia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

"What has been established in these days, when no one slept and only worked? We studied and analysed our product for signs of hacking - it is not infected with a virus and everything is fine, it is safe," said Olesya, managing partner at Intellect Service.

"The update package, which was sent out long before the virus was spread, we checked it 100 times and everything is fine."

Little known outside Ukrainian accounting circles, M.E.Doc is an everyday part of life at around 80 percent of companies in Ukraine. The software allows its 400,000 clients to send and discuss financial documents between internal departments, as well as file them with the Ukrainian state tax service.

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Investigators have said M.E.Doc's expansive reach is what made it a prime target for the unknown hackers, who were looking for a way to infect as many victims as possible.

"These malware families were spread using Ukrainian accounting software called M.E.Doc," researchers at Slovakian security software firm ESET said in a blog post on Friday.

"M.E.Doc has an internal messaging and document exchange system so attackers could send spearphishing messages to victims."

Ukrainian police said on Monday the Linniks could now face criminal charges if it is confirmed they knew about the infection but took no action.

"We have issues with the company's leadership, because they knew there was a virus in their software but didn't do anything ... if this is confirmed, we will bring charges," Serhiy Demedyuk, the head of Ukraine's cyber police, told Reuters in a text message.

Speaking before Demedyuk's comments at the company's modest offices on an industrial estate in Kiev, Sergei, Intellect Service's general director, raised his voice in frustration.

"We built this business over 20 years. What is the point of us killing our own business?"

Olesya said the company was cooperating with investigators and the police were yet to reach any conclusions.

"The cyber police are currently bogged down in the investigation, we gave them the logs of all our servers and there are no traces that our servers spread this virus," she said.

"M.E.Doc is a transportation product, it delivers documents. But is an email program guilty in the distribution of a virus? Hardly."

(Writing by Jack Stubbs; Editing by Anna Willard)

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Family Firm in Ukraine Says It Was Not Responsible for Cyber Attack - New York Times

MOSCOW (AP) Ukraine accused the Russian security services Saturday of planning and launching a cyberattack that locked up computers around the world earlier this week.

The Ukrainian security agency, known as the SBU, alleged in a statement that similarities between the malicious software and previous attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure revealed the work of Russian intelligence services.

The SBU added that the attackers appeared uninterested in making a profit from the ransomware program and were more focused on sowing chaos in Ukraine.

There was no immediate official response from Russias government, but Russian lawmaker Igor Morozov told the RIA Novosti news agency that the Ukrainian charges were fiction and that the attacks were likely the work of the United States.

Ukraine was the country most affected by the attack using a strain of malware known by names including NotPetya. Beginning Tuesday, computers across Ukraine at government agencies, energy companies and banks were disabled as their data was encrypted amid demands for ransom payments.

Two cybersecurity outfits have publicly tied the NotPetya malware to hacking groups that many other experts in turn believe are linked to Russian intelligence operations.

Russian anti-virus companyKaspersky Labhas identified similarities between NotPetya and BlackEnergy, a sophisticated malware assumed to have been used in a series of cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in recent years.

There are several parts of the code and strings that are shared, Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, the head of Kasperskys anti-virus research department, told The Associated Press on Saturday. These families are connected.

ESET, a Slovakian cybersecurity firm, said the cyberattacks did not come out of nowhere.

This was not an isolated incident. This is the latest in a series of similar attacks in Ukraine, ESET said in a Fridayreport, suggesting the reason other countries were hit was because the hackers had underestimated the power of their malware and it had spun out of control.

Attributing cyberattacks is a particularly difficult process, but Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russia of sponsoring electronic intrusions, including the hack of Ukraines voting system ahead of a 2014 national election and assaults that knocked parts of its power grid offline in 2015 and 2016. Relations between the two countries collapsed when Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and began backing separatists fighting Ukrainian forces in the countrys east.

Major companies beyond Ukraine that reported being hit by NotPetya included Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, Russian state-owned oil behemoth Rosneft and FedEx subsidiary TNT.

Several of those affected are still struggling to get back online. A.P. Moller-Maersks chief operating officer, Vincent Clerc,has toldThe Wall Street Journal that he expects his firm to return to some kind of normalcy by Monday.

On the streets of Kiev, Ukraines capital, there were signs that Ukraine had yet to fully recover from the attack as well.

Alexander Havrilenko, 43, said his wife hadnt been paid as expected because her office at Ukraines state-owned Oschadbank was still closed.

She was told to come in Wednesday maybe, he said.

As for who was responsible, Havrilenko didnt hesitate to echo the Ukrainian governments line.

Its Russia, he said.

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Ukraine: Russian security services were behind cyberattack - NBC4i.com

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Reeling From Banking Crisis, Ukraine May Ban Auditor PwC Wall Street Journal (subscription) The government of Ukraine said it may ban PricewaterhouseCoopers from conducting bank audits in the country, the latest in a string of controversies involving the Big Four accounting giant. While under PwC's supervision, PrivatBank, Ukraine's top ...

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Reeling From Banking Crisis, Ukraine May Ban Auditor PwC - Wall Street Journal (subscription)