Experts: "Kyivstar could have been attacked with help from the inside

On the morning of December 12, a large-scale failure occurred at the Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar: mobile and Internet service was cut off, and all systems related to the operator experienced problems.

"Kyivstar claimed a massive hacker attack, while the SBU suggested that Russian special services were behind it.

The company claims that no personal data of users was disclosed, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies are investigating the incident.

"The most important thing is that at the moment the personal data of subscribers has not been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. Yes, our enemies are insidious, but we are ready to face any difficulties, overcome them and continue to work for Ukrainians," Kyivstar said in a statement.

There are many reasons for the large-scale outage: from hardware breakdowns to human error, and external interference cannot be ruled out. Telecom expert Anatoly Frolenkov wrote about this on his Facebook page.

"Given that Kyivstar has always paid sufficient attention to redundancy (in addition to the inclusion of distributed traffic exchange points) and the quality of hardware, and has assembled a very professional team, the reason is most likely external interference (hacker attack)," he said.

Representatives of the telecom community on social media also suggest that the hackers were helped from within the company.

"What kind of access do you need to have to lay down the network core and billing? Everything there is always isolated with dozens of password policies. It's impossible to hack it without help from the inside," they said.

At the same time, telecom expert Sergiy Flesh advises against listening to enemy misinformation: neither banks nor other communications will go down today or tomorrow. "The traffic skew, of course, affected the load taken by other operators. Vodafone Ukraine and lifecell may have overloaded their networks. Top-up terminals, self-service and payment terminals in stores may not work if they had Kyivstar cards. I estimate that the situation will be resolved within a day. In addition, this failure is a good lesson for our military: the army should not rely on civilian communication systems," the expert explains.

"One of the versions that the SBU investigators are currently studying is that Russian special services may be behind this hacker attack," the SBU said.

According to the statement, immediately after the report of the failure, the SBU operational and investigative team went to the offices of Kyivstar to document all the circumstances of the attack.

The SBU's cybercrime specialists are assisting Kyivstar employees and coordinating the efforts of all government agencies to restore the network as soon as possible, the service said.

Read how the events related to the cyberattack on Kyivstar developed in Mind's broadcast "The largest failure at Kyivstar in the history of Ukraine: a timeline of events".