Ukraine’s largest mobile operator goes offline for millions of users after cyber attack

Ukraine’s largest mobile operator Kyivstar went offline for millions of users after a cyber attack. In a statement, Kyivstar said that it had come under a powerful cyberattack that knocked out service to millions of people. “We are working to eliminate the consequences of this attack to restore communication as soon as possible,” the head of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov, said in a video statement, adding that users’ personal data had not been compromised.
According to a report in the New York Times, they said that the attack also affected internet access and that it was “unclear” when service would be restored.After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian telecom companies banded together to share services so that users could roam on a different provider if their service was interrupted. But the national roaming scheme was also offline, operators said.
Blamed Russia indirectly for the attack
While Komarov did not explicitly say who was responsible for the attack, he did point the finger at Russia. “The war with Russia has many dimensions, and one of them is in cyberspace,” he said.
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency SBU too said that 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 frequently come under Russian bombardment, warned Tuesday morning that the air alarm system was affected. “The notification system will temporarily not work,” Sumy’s regional military administration said in a statement.
Largest financial institution too hit
At the same time, one of Ukraine’s large financial institutions, Monobank, said that it, too, had been targeted by hackers. While it was not immediately clear if the attacks had been carried out by the same hackers, the effects of both were widely felt. In the western city of Lviv, the departure boards of public transit systems were down and some people were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.
According to a report published in February by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, Russian government-backed hackers targeted users in Ukraine more than any other country last year. In March, Microsoft warned that a hacking group with ties to the Russian government appeared to be preparing new cyberattacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and government offices.