A massive attack on Ukrainian telecom causes fixed network failure

At the beginning of the Russian attack on Ukraine, many actually expected massive attacks on IT infrastructures – but things remained calm for the most part. But now a violent attack brought almost the entire telecommunications group Ukrtelecom to its knees. “Today, the enemy has carried out a powerful cyber attack on Ukrtelecom’s IT infrastructure,” said Yurii Shchyhol, head of Ukraine’s State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection, according to a report from a news agency.

Reuters The state-owned telecommunications company maintains the fixed network in the country and thus also the main infrastructure for internet connections. In the course of that, there were repeated interruptions in telecommunications services. Problems often occurred, especially when starting a new internet session, for example when setting up a new DSL connection. And re-logging has become quite common due to recurring power outages in some regions of Ukraine.

No more episodes

“The attack was repulsed,” Shchyhol reported. Gradually, all services will be made available again in the usual form. In the meantime, there should be no more restrictions – which, of course, only applies to the extent that the user is in a region that is still relatively untouched by the war. It was often assumed that with the outbreak of war significantly more extensive attacks on IT systems would take place. The most spectacular cases were an attack on a communications satellite and an attack on the smaller Ukrainian provider Triolan. In this case, however, only a few systems had to be cleaned or rebuilt, resulting in minor outages but no longer outages.