"The biggest hacker attack in the world": Kyivstar head told when it comes back

The hackers tried to destroy the critical infrastructure of the country and to collapse the moral spirit of Ukrainians, says Alexander Komarov. The network has undergone great damage, but foreign companies help to eliminate it. On December 12, a powerful cyberattack was carried out on the Ukrainian operator "Kyivstar". As of December 13, the network still does not work completely and 24 million subscribers - without communication.

In an interview with Forbes, President of the company Alexander Komarov told why the restoration of mobile communication and the Internet is delayed how and for what purpose hackers attacked networks and what assistance was provided by Kyivstar. According to Komarov, employees of the company early on December 12 noticed anomalies on the network, which began to work with large interruptions.

At first, they thought that there were problems either with a switching system or with a transport network, but they were only a "distracting maneuver" by cybercriminals, as the nucleus of the network was attacked. "The nucleus of the network consists of several elements: a virtual network working on a physical network, as well as an IT infrastructure. And a cascade fall in a large number of parts of this infrastructure began," Komarov said.

-"In fact, this is the biggest hacker attack on Telecom infrastructure in the world. There was no successful attacks of this scale. And, we will be honest, not many countries that Russia attacked. " When asked if it was a virus, Komarov replied that there were different versions, but in the interests of the investigation - not to disclose them, but added that "there were movements inside the network" and that the perimeter of the network was broken.

He also noted that due to the inability to stop the attack, it was decided to physically disconnect the equipment. The head of the company explained why subscribers lost access to operator services. This happened because client databases did not respond to the network request for the client's profile and its services. And the services began to be switched off automatically. Oleksandr Komarov stressed that custom data was likely to be stolen: "We have no confirmation that they received any data.

We did not see any atypical behavior of traffic" According to him, hackers tried to destroy the Kyivstar infrastructure, critical for Countries, as the operator's services use about 24 million people. "Our basic version that the goal is to destroy the infrastructure, to" put "the critical infrastructure of the country.

It is possible to defile the presidential visit to the United States, add something to the energy blackouts, to influence the moral spirit of Ukrainians through other levers," Komarov said. When asked when the connection is restored, Komarov did not give a clear answer. He only noted that this is a complex process, as many network connection processes are tested and manually connected. However, a fixed Internet has been partially restored.

As for mobile communication, clients should not expect that it will happen quickly, at best it will be restored on December 13. "With mobile services a little more difficult . . . there is a very high level of uncertainty. You restore the efficiency of some system and you begin to get new problems. Then you need to check the whole system so that it does not have hostile software or conditional backdowers left by this attack which leaves an unprotected perimeter, " - explained Alexander Komarov.