War between Russia and Ukraine: Zelensky visits Washington with an urgent appeal for more war funding
Ukraine’s largest mobile operator said it was hit by a powerful cyberattack on Tuesday morning that knocked out services to millions of people.
The Kyivstar company said the attack also affected internet access and it was “unclear” when service would be restored. The interruption poses a real danger in a country where many rely on telephone alerts to warn them of impending Russian bombing.
“We are working to eliminate the consequences of this attack to restore communications as soon as possible,” Kyivstar head Oleksandr Komarov said in a video statement, adding that users’ personal data had not been compromised.
Although Mr Komarov did not explicitly say who was responsible for the attack and no immediate claim of responsibility was made, the implication was clear.
“The war with Russia has many dimensions, and one of them is taking place in cyberspace,” he said.
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, known as the SBU, said it would investigate and that one line of inquiry would be whether “Russian special services” were behind the hack.
Officials in the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, which has been hit repeatedly by Russian bombardments, warned Tuesday morning that the air raid siren system had been hit.
“The reporting system will temporarily not work,” Sumy’s regional military administration said in a statement.
Data showed that connectivity for Kievstar users fell from almost 100 percent to around 12 percent on Tuesday morning, with both fixed and mobile services affected, according to NetBlocks, a cybersecurity research group.
At the same time, one of Ukraine’s major financial institutions, Monobank, said it: was also targeted by hackers. While it was not immediately clear whether the attacks were carried out by the same hackers, the impact of both was widely felt. In the western city of Lviv, public transport departure signs were disabled and some people were unable to withdraw money from ATMs
After Russia’s large-scale invasion, Ukrainian telecom companies banded together to share services, allowing users to switch providers if their service was interrupted. But the national roaming program was also offline on Tuesday, operators said.
Tuesday’s attack was not the first time Ukrainian telecom companies have been targeted since the February 2022 invasion. and experts say the attacks are part of a broader campaign.
Russian government-backed hackers targeted users in Ukraine more than any other country last year, according to a report published in February by Google’s Threat Analysis Group.
“While we see these attackers heavily targeting the Ukrainian government and military entities, the campaigns we disrupted also demonstrate a strong focus on critical infrastructure, utilities and public services, and the media and information space,” the analysis found.
In March, Microsoft warned that a hacking group with ties to the Russian government appeared to be preparing new cyber attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and government buildings.