Kiev speaks of an “act of war” by Russia after the cyber attack that paralyzed the Kyivstar network

The largest operator of mobile telephony in UkraineKyivstar reported a act of “war” by the Russia following the major cyber attack that today paralyzed its network and “partially destroyed” its IT infrastructure. “This is a war, which is being waged not only on the battlefield, but also in the world of virtual networks, and unfortunately, we have been affected by this war,” said Kyivstar Group CEO Oleksandr Komarov, speaking to Ukrainian state television.

“(The attack) provoked serious damage to IT infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the level of virtual networks, so we disrupted Kyivstar’s services to limit the enemy’s access,” Komarov said. “This morning we were the target of a major hacker attack. It caused a technical failure that made mobile phone and Internet access services temporarily unavailable,” said an earlier announcement by Kyivstar posted on Facebook, as reported by APE-MPE.

The Ukrainian security service SBU announced for its part that the cyber attack on Kyivstar may be an operation of Russian services. “One of the versions currently being investigated by the SBU is that Russian special services may be behind this cyber attack,” the SBU said in a written statement to Reuters.

Kyivstar’s network has more than 24 million subscribers. The outage affected a number of services across the country. Ukraine’s largest bank, Privatbank, reported that some of the Its ATMs and terminals were affected by the cyber attackaccording to the Hromadske public television website.

In Sumi (northeast), air raid warning sirens stopped working, the military administration of this city announced on Telegram. In Lviv, western Ukraine, the outage affected the operation of the public lighting system, according to the city council. One of the major Ukrainian banks, Monobank, said it was the target of a “massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack”.