Millions of Ukrainians could have been left without cellphones and internet since Tuesday after one of the biggest cyberattacks since Russia sent the army to the neighboring country in February 2022. Ukraine attributes the action to a group of hackers which links to Russian military intelligence.
Although the impact on the number of victims is difficult to determine, the target of the attack was Ukraine's largest mobile phone operator, Kyivstar, which has 24.3 million cell phone subscriptions. lular and provides internet to more than a million homes. The attack rocked banking and other critical industries. A regional air raid warning service was also affected.
Kyivstar was due to start restoring voice services to some of its customers last night, and would restart others later, its president, Oleksandr Komarov, told Reuters yesterday.
The hacker-activist group Solntsepiok claimed responsibility for the attack yesterday in a message published on Telegram. According to them, they destroyed 10,000 computers, more than 4,000 servers and cloud storage and backup systems. Kyivstar told X yesterday that this is "false".
"We attacked Kyivstar because it provides communications to the armed forces of Ukraine, as well as state bodies and power structures of Ukraine," they explained.
Russia always denies that it is behind this kind of deciberats.
The Solntsepiok hackers offered a “special thanks to Kyivstar employees who do not remain indifferent”, which could indicate some kind of help. The Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) said on Tuesday that they had opened a treason investigation.
The cyberattack took place hours before Russia's second missile attack this week against Kyiv, which Russian newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets called "a double whammy." The digital security expert Ígor Bedérov explained in this medium that the cyber attack could have affected the coordination of the Ukrainian troops. "Although the Ukrainian military uses the Starlink network for coordination and communication, many actions such as data transmission are still carried out with instant messaging (Telegram, Signal, etc., linked to cellular communication ). Without the operator, they all work extremely poorly,” he explained.
In the Russian missile attack against Kyiv, the Ukrainian authorities yesterday counted 53 injuries and damage to several residential buildings and a children's hospital. Russia claims, for its part, that it attacked military installations.
