Over almost a decade, the hacker group inside Russia’s GRU army intelligence company generally known as Sandworm has launched among the most disruptive cyberattacks in historical past towards Ukraine’s energy grids, monetary system, media, and authorities businesses. Indicators now level to that very same regular suspect being liable for sabotaging a serious cellular supplier for the nation, slicing off communications for tens of millions and even briefly sabotaging the air raid warning system within the capital of Kyiv.
On Tuesday, a cyberattack hit Kyivstar, one in every of Ukraine’s largest cellular and web suppliers. The main points of how that assault was carried out stay removed from clear. Nevertheless it “resulted in important companies of the corporate’s expertise community being blocked,” in accordance with a assertion posted by Ukraine’s Laptop Emergency Response Crew, or CERT-UA.
Kyivstar’s CEO, Oleksandr Komarov, informed Ukrainian nationwide tv on Tuesday, in accordance with Reuters, that the hacking incident “considerably broken [Kyivstar’s] infrastructure [and] restricted entry.”
“We couldn’t counter it on the digital degree, so we shut down Kyivstar bodily to restrict the enemy’s entry,” he continued. “Battle can be occurring in our on-line world. Sadly, now we have been hit because of this battle.”
The Ukrainian authorities hasn’t but publicly attributed the cyberattack to any recognized hacker group—nor have any cybersecurity firms or researchers. However on Tuesday, a Ukrainian official inside its SSSCIP pc safety company, which oversees CERT-UA, identified in a message to reporters {that a} group generally known as Solntsepek had claimed credit score for the assault in a Telegram put up, and famous that the group has been linked to the infamous Sandworm unit of Russia’s GRU.
“We, the Solntsepek hackers, take full duty for the cyber assault on Kyivstar. We destroyed 10 computer systems, greater than 4 thousand servers, all cloud storage and backup programs,” reads the message in Russian, addressed to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and posted to the group’s Telegram account. The message additionally contains screenshots that seem to point out entry to Kyivstar’s community, although this might not be verified. “We attacked Kyivstar as a result of the corporate gives communications to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in addition to authorities businesses and legislation enforcement businesses of Ukraine. The remainder of the places of work serving to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, prepare!”
Solntsepek has beforehand been used as a entrance for the hacker group Sandworm, the Moscow-based Unit 74455 of Russia’s GRU, says John Hultquist, the top of menace intelligence at Google-owned cybersecurity agency Mandiant and a longtime tracker of the group. He declined, nonetheless, to say which of Solntsepek’s community intrusions have been linked to Sandworm up to now, suggesting that a few of these intrusions could not but be public. “It is a group that has claimed credit score for incidents we all know have been carried out by Sandworm,” Hultquist says, including that Solntsepek’s Telegram put up bolsters his earlier suspicions that Sandworm was accountable. “Given their constant concentrate on one of these exercise, it is laborious to be shocked that one other main disruption is linked to them.”
