A massive outage affecting Ukraine’s largest mobile operator Kyivstar, which occurred on the morning of December 12, is linked to a powerful hacking attack. This was confirmed by the company’s representatives.
According to them, customers’ personal data were not compromised. Together with law enforcement, the operator is examining the circumstances and consequences of the intrusion into its operations.
Earlier, the publication DEV quoted sources inside the company that the cyber incident caused problems in the core of the network.
Sources denied information circulated by several Telegram channels about a search at the operator’s office.
As a result of the outage, some subscribers cannot access telecommunications services or the internet. The company’s website is also down.
Kyivstar specialists are working to resolve the issue, restoration timelines have not yet been announced.
Our team will definitely provide compensation to subscribers who had no service or could not use our services.
— Kyivstar (@TwiyKyivstar) December 12, 2023
The company advised subscribers to use the “National Roaming” service, which allows switching between different mobile operators without changing SIM cards and tariffs. However sources in the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine said that the nature of the outage does not permit this.
Kyivstar’s customer base numbers 24 million people.
PrivatBank spokesman Oleg Serga, in commentary to hromadske said that Kyivstar’s outage will partially affect the operation of POS terminals and ATMs that operate on Kyivstar’s mobile cards.
“The maximum risk to our ATM network is up to 5%. This is not a mass incident”, — emphasized Serga.
In the city of Sumy, alert notifications are not working due to Kyivstar issues. The notification will be temporarily carried out by patrol officers and the State Emergency Service.
CEO of Kyivstar, Alexander Komarov, said that the IT infrastructure of the company is “partially destroyed.” In his words, this is the first such powerful hacker attack in the history of Ukraine’s mobile communications.
Monobank co-founder Oleg Gorokhovskyi said that his company was subjected to a DDoS attack; in particular, issues are observed at the “entry points to Amazon.” Nevertheless the top manager assured that “everything is under control.”
As a reminder, in February 2022 several Ukrainian banks and government resources were victims of massive DDoS attack.