Kyiv, Ukraine
Reuters
Ukraine’s biggest mobile network operator was hit on Tuesday by what appeared to be the largest cyber attack of the war with Russia so far, knocking out mobile and internet services for millions and the air raid alert system in parts of Kyiv region.
Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers – more than half of Ukraine’s population – as well as more than 1.1 million home internet subscribers.
People walk past a store of Ukraine’s telecommunications company Kyivstar, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 12th December, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Alina Smutko
Its CEO Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was “a result of” the war with Russia, although he did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, and that the company’s IT infrastructure had been “partially destroyed”.
“War is also happening in cyberspace. Unfortunately, we have been hit as a result of this war,” he told a national television broadcast.
US INTELLIGENCE ASSESSES UKRAINE WAR HAS COST RUSSIA 315,000 CASUALTIES – SOURCE
A declassified US intelligence report assessed that the Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90 per cent of the personnel it had when the conflict began, a source familiar with the intelligence said on Tuesday.
The report also assessed that Moscow’s losses in personnel and armored vehicles to Ukraine’s military have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years, the source said.
The Russian embassy and the Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Russian officials have said Western estimates of Russian death tolls in the war are vastly exaggerated and almost always underestimate Ukrainian losses – which Russian officials say are vast.
The source spoke as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made a last-ditch plea to US lawmakers on Capitol Hill to keep US military aid flowing to Ukraine, first meeting behind closed doors with US senators.
The source said the recently declassified US intelligence report assessed that Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, with 360,000 personnel.
Since then, the report found, 315,000 Russian troops, or about 87 per cent of the total with which it started the war, have been killed or injured, the source said.
The source said those losses are the reason Russia has been forced to loosen recruitment standards and draft convicts and older civilians to deploy in Ukraine.
“The scale of losses has forced Russia to take extraordinary measures to sustain its ability to fight. Russia declared a partial mobilization of 300,000 personnel in late 2022, and has relaxed standards to allow recruitment of convicts and older civilians,” the assessment said, according to the source.
The Russian army has been left with 1,300 armored vehicles on the battlefield and is having to bolster those forces with T62 tanks produced in the 1970s, the source said.
Kyiv treats its losses as a state secret and officials say disclosing the figure could harm its war effort. A New York Times report in August cited US officials as putting the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000.
Writing in the Ukrainian journal Tyzhden, historian Yaroslav Tynchenko and volunteer Herman Shapovalenko last month said Shapovalenko’s Book of Memory project had confirmed 24,500 Ukrainian combat and non-combat deaths using open sources.
The real figure was likely higher, they said.
– JONATHAN LANDAY, Washington DC, US/Reuters
“[The attack] significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy’s access,” Komarov said.
Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency told Reuters one of the possibilities it was investigating was that of a cyber-attack conducted by Russian security services.
Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kyivstar issued a statement later on Facebook saying it had restored some services and hoped all its operations would be back to normal on Wednesday. Services, it said, would be restored gradually.
Russian hacktivist group Killnet put out a statement on Telegram claiming responsibility for the attack. They did not provide evidence for their claim.
A source close to Kyivstar said the Ukrainian military was not affected by the outage.
The outage was one of the biggest hacks to have hit Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February, 2022, when a cyber attack hit Viasat Inc, disabling thousands of satellite internet modems across Europe and causing a huge loss in communications for Ukraine at the war’s outset.
In Kyiv, some people rushed to connect to other network providers and a small queue of customers formed at a store for Vodafone, Kyivstar’s largest competitor.
One man who bought a new SIM was 25-year-old PR consultant Dmytro. “My connection has completely disappeared, my internet and my satellite navigation aren’t working, I can’t move around the city,” he said.
State actor
A source close to Ukraine’s cyber defence agency also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified.
“It’s definitely a state actor,” said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed “a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks”.
“There’s no ransom. It’s all destruction. So it’s not a financially motivated attack,” said the source.
Ukrainian officials said that air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in Kyiv region, which surrounds the capital, were affected by the cyberattack.
“Patrol police and State Emergency Service crews will work in those settlements where there are problems with the operation of the systems,” Kyiv region Governor Ruslan Kravchenko wrote on Facebook.
“They will announce aerial danger through loudspeakers,” he said.
Kyivstar, owned by Amsterdam-listed mobile telecoms operator Veon, said in a statement on Facebook that it was working to repair the outage and was cooperating with law enforcement bodies.
Veon said it was also investigating the attack and it could not yet quantify the financial impact.
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Komarov said two databases containing customer data had been damaged and were currently locked.
“The most important thing is that the personal data of users has not been compromised,” Kyivstar said in its statement, promising to compensate customers.
Separately, the co-founder of Monobank, a major Ukrainian payment system, said in a social media post that his company was currently suffering a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but that everything was “under control”. He subsequently said that attack had been fought off.
Representatives of PrivatBank and Oschadbank, two major Ukrainian financial institutions, told media outlet Hromadske that some of their ATMs and card terminals had been affected by the Kyivstar outage.
Ukrainian state bodies and companies have often accused Russia of orchestrating cyberattacks against them in the past.
– Reporting by TOM BALMFORTH in Kyiv, Ukraine; YULIIA DYSA in Gdansk, Poland; CHRISTOPHER BING in Washington DC, US; and JAMES PEARSON in London, UK.
