One of the largest Ukrainian telecom-providers, Ukrtelecom, suffered in the powerful attack on March 28, 2022. It was just an incident during the hybrid warfare between Russia and Ukraine, that we are always trying to inform you about the latest situations.
Ukrtelecom’s CIO Kyrylo Honcharuk spoke about the details of the Ukrtelecom attack:
“Ukrtelecom as part of Ukraine’s vital information infrastructure is in the focus of hackers’ attention all the time. We’ve been observing the increase in the number of cyberattacks against our infrastructure since the very beginning of the invasion. The attack on March 28 was powerful and sophisticated,”
Officials mentioned that the discovery phase of the attack launched from the Ukrainian territory recently temporarily occupied by the Russians. The hackers used for discovery a compromised account of the company’s employee.
Once they gained access, the hackers then tried to disable Ukrtelecom’s equipment and servers to gain control over its network and equipment. There was also an attempt to change the passwords of employees’ accounts and of logins to access equipment and firewalls. With the attack, Ukrtelecom temporarily limited the access to its services for private and business clients. The traffic in the network fell to 13% from the regular regime of the network’s functioning. The Internet access for the clients started to be restored late on March 28. The following day, Ukrtelecom services became available to almost all its users.
The investigation continues. We saw several attacks on Ukraine’s organizations related to Russian invasion, however, this attack cannot be attributed to any hacker group. We expect to see more attacks on Ukrainian targets including government, energy and financial organizations.