Ukrainian telecommunications company hacked

(Photo: Reuters)

According to Forbes, this is the most serious cyber attack ever aimed at Internet service Ukraine since Russia conducted a special military operation in the country. Yurii Shchyhol, Chairman of the State Service for the Protection of Special Communications Information of Ukraine, confirmed that the “enemy” carried out a powerful cyber attack on Ukrtelecom’s information technology infrastructure. However, the attack was repelled and the carrier began to restore service to customers.

Ukrtelecom is Ukraine’s largest fixed network service provider. In addition, the company also sells Internet and mobile services. A spokesman for Ukrtelecom also announced that services are gradually recovering. Ukraine is investigating the attack. It is not clear whether Ukrtelecom suffered a denial of service attack or a more sophisticated intrusion campaign.

On the morning of March 28, NetBlocks, a service that monitors Internet problems, posted on Twitter after observing “connections down” and “outages on a national scale increasingly intense”. At one point, the Internet connection was only 13% of what it was before the war broke out. Alp Toker, Director of NetBlocks, assessed that the connection was gradually lost, indicating that it did not have to lose power or disconnect the network. He commented that the attack hit the heart of the state-owned carrier and they seem to have difficulty minimizing the damage.

According to Forbes, a similar incident occurred in early March with Triolan, a small Ukrainian carrier. Some of Triolan’s internal systems were reset to factory settings, resulting in some subscribers losing connection.

Last week, Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) revealed figures showing that the country was the subject of 60 different cyber attacks. Of these, 11 targeted government and local authorities, with eight targeting law enforcement and military. There were only four attacks against telecom carriers and other technology firms. Most have the goal of collecting data, although some “wiper” want to destroy data on the computers of subjects in Ukraine.

CERT concludes: “Despite the increasing number of attacks, the majority are unsuccessful. Even with successful cases, there is almost no impact on critical infrastructure.”

Ukrainian telecommunications companies have to maintain Internet service amid the rain of bullets. Forbes said the teams had to travel to bombed cities, from Kharkiv to Okhtyrka, at times of non-combatant work to replace and repair equipment.

Du Lam (According to Forbes, Reuters)