During the cyberattack, hackers destroyed 40% of Kyivstarʼs infrastructure. The biggest impact was on the virtual layer of the network.
This was announced by the president of "Kyivstar" Oleksandr Komarov during the NV event.
"The first goal of hackers is to destroy the infrastructure as much as possible and sow chaos. In the hour and a half that we lost control of the network, they completely wiped the customer database. These are not customer profiles, but internal profiles that help the system," said Komarov.
Komarov stated that this attack on "Kyivstar" was quite unique. About a thousand people were involved in the recovery operation.
What happened to "Kyivstar"
On December 12, the operator "Kyivstar" suffered a large-scale hacker attack, as a result of which subscribers lost their connection and the Internet. The Russian group Solntsepek claimed responsibility for the attack. The SBU stated that it was connected to the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate.The SBU started an investigation under eight articles, including sabotage and treason.
Oleksandr Komarov, general director of "Kyivstar", said that the hacker attack was very powerful. Part of the virtual IT infrastructure is destroyed. Hackers partially achieved their goal.
On December 13, "Kyivstar" subscribers were blocked from accessing national roaming in order to avoid overloading other networks. There were also difficulties in the operation of the banking system, in particular, in the operation of POS terminals.
On the same day, the president of "Kyivstar" admitted that hackers broke the companyʼs security through the account of one of the employees. According to Oleksandr Komarov, this attack is "not a matter of technology", but the fact that in any organization there can be people who "conditionally point Russian missiles or give away their passwords, because social engineers work well".
On December 20 , Kyivstar resumed all services in Ukraine and abroad. Also , "Kyivstar" canceled the following tariff fee for some users.