By KYIV. Dec 12 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Due to a failure in the work of the Ukrainian mobile operator Kyivstar, the company’s fixed-line network continues to partially operate. However, if the situation is not changed, it will shut down, Kyivstar President Oleksandr Komarov warned during the national telethon on Tuesday.
“The fixed-line network is partially working, but if we do not change the situation, it will stop working over the next 8-12 hours,” Komarov said.
He also said that national roaming does not work because the register systems in which customer data is located are partially destroyed.
“They are locked and therefore there cannot be access to national roaming. We do not allow external contacts into the network now, even if they are verified as our partners,” Komarov said.
The president of Kyivstar said that representatives of supplier companies, in particular Ericsson and Microsoft, are helping the company overcome the consequences of the outage.
“Look, our suppliers are helping us. All the largest suppliers from Ericsson to Microsoft are in our office, and everyone helps as much as they can, because different elements of the network use different equipment, different supplier technologies,” Komarov said.
He added that as the extent of the destruction becomes clear, the company is involving suppliers in restoration work.
In addition, Komarov said that after the failure, “a lot of work will be done to correct errors in all areas.”
The goal of the attack was as much as possible destruction of the virtual IT infrastructure, the president of Kyivstar suggested. Partially, he said, the goal was achieved.
“Our conclusion so far is that the goal was to destroy the infrastructure. And I will say that they partially achieved this goal… Our IT infrastructure was significantly damaged. Access was limited, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy’s access to the Kyivstar infrastructure,” he said.
“IT specialists do not have access to your systems, because the entire perimeter, which is protected by a special directory where all rights are registered, is completely destroyed. Therefore, we need to act at the physical level, connecting through patch codes to each element of the network, to understand the level of destruction at the moment,” Komarov added.
At the same time, he assured that there are no leaks of customer data from the network.
“We don’t see any leaks of customer data from the network at all. In general, in a normal situation, this is a fairly visible picture when they start downloading some data from your networks. There are no such signs,” the president of Kyivstar said.
