A “massive” cyberattack knocked Ukraine’s national telecommunications provider Ukrtelecom almost completely offline Monday in what network monitors called its most severe outage since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion.
Ukrtelecom, Ukraine’s state-owned telephone company, came under cyberattack by Russia on Monday, according to the country’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (Ssscip)
In a tweet, the Ssscip said that the company’s IT infrastructure came under an attack, which was neutralised. As of about 2040 BST, the company was working on resuming services.
“In order to preserve its network infrastructure and to continue providing services to Ukraine’s Armed Forces as well as to the customers, Ukrtelecom has temporarily limited providing its services to the majority of private users and business clients,” another Tweet noted.
The chair of Ukraine’s state service for special communication, Yurii Shchyhol, blamed “the enemy” in a statement without specifically naming Russia. So that service could continue to Ukraine’s military, most customers were cut off from service, he said.
The outage began Monday morning and persisted into the evening, when Shchyhol said services were being restored.
Alp Toker, director of the London-based monitor Netblocks, said connectivity for Ukrtelecom has collapsed to just 13 percent of pre-war levels.
Ukrtelecom is the seventh-largest provider in Ukraine in traffic moved but, as the pre-independence incumbent, is likely the lone provider in much of rural Ukraine, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at the network management firm Kentik.
Urktelecom provides telephone, internet and mobile service.
The incident occurs a month after a cyberattack hit satellite internet provider Viasat, which took down access for users in Ukraine right as the Kremlin began to invade the country. Reportedly, the US has now concluded the Russian government was behind the Viasat attack, although the White House has yet to assign blame publicly.
Since then, Ukraine has suffered sporadic network outages, often due to bombardments from the Russian military destroying local telecommunication networks and electricity supplies. At the same time, malware capable of wiping Windows systems has been spotted trying to infect numerous computers and servers belonging to Ukrainian companies.
