Ukraine’s largest telecommunications provider Kyivstar says it has suffered a “massive” cyber attack that has disrupted phone and internet services for millions of people across the country.
In a Facebook post confirming the incident on Tuesday, Kyivstar wrote that the cyberattack caused a “technical failure” that left customers without mobile connections or Internet access. Kyivstar serves more than 24 million mobile subscribers and more than 1.1 million residential Internet users, according to the company’s website, which was also unavailable at press time.
Officials in the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy also warned that the air raid warning system was also affected by the Kyivstar outage. “Notification system will be temporarily down,” according to statement by the Sumi Regional Military Command posted on Telegram.
said Kyivstar CEO Oleksandr Komarov a video statement that Russia was responsible for the disruption. “The war with the Russian Federation has many dimensions and one of them is cyberspace,” Komarov said. “Unfortunately, this morning the operator became the target of a super-powerful cyber attack, due to which communications services and Internet access are unavailable.”
When asked if he believed Russia was behind the attack, a spokesman for Ukraine’s State Service for Special Communications, or SSSCIP, told TechCrunch that “it’s too early to draw any conclusions.”
“The investigation of the incident, which caused a technical failure in the operator’s work, as a result of which communication and internet access services are temporarily unavailable, is ongoing by specialists of the competent services,” the SSSCIP spokesman, who did not provide name, added. “Among others, experts from the Government Computer Emergency Response Team CERT-UA are involved in this project.”
Kyivstar spokeswoman Iryna Lelichenko was not immediately available to answer TechCrunch’s questions.
In his video statement, Oleksandr added that it is “still not entirely clear” when the telecom giant will restore normal operations. Dutch VEON, parent company of Kyivstar, he said in a statement its technical teams are “working to eliminate the consequences of the hacker attack and restore communication as soon as possible.”
Kyivstar apologized for the “temporary inconvenience” and promised to compensate users affected by the outage, but said subscribers’ personal data had not been compromised. “Yes, our enemies are insidious. But we are ready to face any difficulties, overcome them and continue to work for Ukrainians,” added the company.
At the same time Kyivstar was attacked, Monobank, one of Ukraine’s largest financial institutions, said it had also been targeted by hackers. The bank’s co-founder Oleh Gorokhovsky he said in a Telegram post that the organization had been hit by a “massive DDoS attack”, referring to cyberattacks that involve floods of spam aimed at bringing down websites and services, but added that “everything is under control”.
