Alexander Komarov, the CEO of Kyivstar, has described the attack on the mobile operator as the world's largest hacker attack on telecommunications infrastructure. He made this statement in an interview with Forbes.
"Veon, as the owner of Kyivstar and a public company, has made relevant statements. It declared that Kyivstar is under a massive hacker attack. In fact, this is the largest hacker attack on telecom infrastructure in the world. There haven't been successful attacks of such scale. And, to be frank, not many countries have been targeted by Russia," said Komarov.
He explained that the decision to "shut everything down from the grid" was made in real-time. It was necessary to reduce the impact and destruction of the operator's infrastructure.
According to Komarov, there is currently no confirmation that hackers obtained any data.
"We haven't seen any atypical traffic behavior. Our basic assumption is that the goal is to destroy infrastructure, to put the country's critical infrastructure at risk. Perhaps to disrupt the president's visit to the U.S., add something to power outages, influence the morale of Ukrainians through other levers," he speculated.
The final timeline for restoring the operator's services is currently unknown. Work on addressing the consequences of the attack and restoring mobile services is planned to begin today, December 13.
"With mobile services, it's a bit more challenging. The basic scenario, I hope, is that we will start restoring this service tomorrow. But there is a very high level of uncertainty. You restore the operability of a certain system, and new problems start to emerge. Then you need to check the entire system to ensure there is no hostile software or conditional backdoors left by this attack, leaving the perimeter unprotected," explained the CEO of Kyivstar.
He added that both government agencies and a global team, including companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Ericsson, are working on the restoration process.
