Kyivstar, Ukraine's biggest mobile telecom operator, has suffered a cyberattack that took out cell service for more than half of Ukraine's population and cut Internet for millions - as well as knocking offline the emergency air-raid system in the capital region.
In any event, the strike is the most significant to hit Ukrainian communications infrastructure since the Viasat outage that followed Russia's February 2022 invasion.
Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers and more than 1.1 million home Internet subscribers.
Vodafone, Kyivstar's largest competitor, remains operational.
During the broadcast, Komarov stressed that the destructive attack is almost certainly meant to support Russia's broader kinetic strikes in the war, though he didn't name a likely culprit.
On its Telegram channel, the Russian hacktivist group known as Killnet quickly took responsibility for the attack, but it's a claim that Dan Black, principal analyst at Mandiant Intelligence for Google Cloud, regards with skepticism.
Russian-backed cyberattack activity has been a fixture in the Ukraine-Russia conflict since its inception, with activity encompassing everything from espionage to devastating wiper attacks and critical infrastructure targeting.
So if not Killnet, one of the other usual advanced persistent threat suspects could be the perpetrator, according to Nick Tausek, lead security automation architect at Swimlane.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Tue, 12 Dec 2023 21:45:07 +0000