Tag Archive for: Phone

Ukraine faces second day of huge phone and internet outage after suspected Russian cyberattack

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Ukraine on Wednesday entered the second day of limited communications after its largest mobile phone and internet provider was hit by a huge cyberattack, Ukrainian officials and the internet provider said Wednesday.

The company, Kyivstar, shut down all mobile and internet service Tuesday after experiencing what its CEO said was a Russian cyberattack.

The Kyivstar hack is one of the biggest cyberattacks on the civilian telecommunications industry in history, and one of the most influential of the Russia-Ukraine war. Kyivstar’s website is still inaccessible, but an archived version of it from November said it has more than 25 million customers nationwide, more than half the country’s population.

Kyivstar announced Wednesday it had begun to restore service, but Kentik, a company that tracks global internet connectivity, said Kyivstar was operating at a fraction of its normal traffic levels.

In addition to cutting off communications for millions of Ukrainians, the Kyivstar attack resulted in other critical services shutting down.

The head of Kyiv’s Regional Military Administration, Ruslan Kravchenko, said on Telegram that the outage disrupted air alert systems in multiple cities, forcing authorities to use backup alarms. Russia launched a missile attack Wednesday morning, Kyiv’s mayor said on his Telegram channel, resulting in 53 people being injured and 20 being hospitalized.

Ukraine’s largest bank, PrivatBank, announced that a lack of functioning internet connection had resulted in some ATMs and point-of-sale terminals not working.

In the city of Liviv, which uses internet-connected smart streetlights, the Kyivstar outage meant that the lights had to be disconnected manually, the City Council said on its website.

Ukrainian authorities, including communications officials and representatives from the Security Service of Ukraine, indicated in emailed statements Wednesday that the culprit was a unit within Russian military intelligence, the GRU, that Western governments and cybersecurity researchers have said is responsible for previous destructive attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Both the Security…

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Cyberattack hits Kyiv, knocking out phone and internet service

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KYIV — A large-scale cyberattack hit Ukraine on Tuesday, crippling Kyivstar, the country’s largest mobile phone provider, and knocking out service to more than 24 million subscribers both in the war-ravaged country and abroad, where millions have fled Russia’s invasion.

In some parts of the country, the loss of mobile phone and internet service cut off early-warning air raid systems used to alert citizens of imminent Russian missile and drone strikes. The cyberstrike also shut down some bank machines.

Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, said that it was investigating the possibility “that the special services of the Russian Federation may be behind this hacker attack.” In a news statement, the SBU said that it had opened criminal investigations into the incident, including charges of treason, sabotage, and “planning, preparation, unleashing and waging an aggressive war.”

The attack took place Tuesday morning in Ukraine, hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky was set in Washington to meet US lawmakers and President Biden in an urgent bid to drum up some $60 billion in crucially needed aid.

The hacking underscored the continuing threat to Ukraine’s statehood, as political infighting between Democrats and Republicans in Washington risks cutting off aid to Ukraine from its most important ally.

The war in Ukraine has combined elements of World War I-style trench warfare with 21st-century high-tech weaponry, including swarms of explosive drones, many controlled using live feeds over the internet. Russia has repeatedly sought to disrupt internet service in Ukraine, forcing the country’s military to rely heavily on Starlink, the satellite internet system operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.

The attack raised the prospect that a large number of Ukrainians would not be able to use a smartphone application warning of air raid alerts, tools many depend on since street sirens are not always audible. The apps still work if telephones are connected to Wi-Fi.

Kyiv’s city administration said on Telegram that the cyberattack did “not affect the stability of the air alert system in the capital.”

Some regional officials said that early-warning air raid sirens were fully or…

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Ukraine’s Largest Phone Operator Hacked in “Act of War”

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Kyivstar, Ukraine’s leading mobile network operator, is experiencing a significant shutdown allegedly due to a cyber-attack.

The company, owned by Amsterdam-based Veon, warned on December 12 that it had suffered a “powerful” cyber-attack that caused a technical failure, rendering internet access and mobile communications temporarily unavailable for its customers.

Although Kyivstar did not make directly attribute the attack initially, its director general later told Agence France Presse (AFP) that the firm considered the attack to be linked with the war against Russia.

In a Facebook post, Kyivstar said it was investigating the issue with law enforcement agencies, had reported it to Ukrainian state services, and was “working to eliminate the consequences and restore communications as soon as possible.”

“The most important thing is that, as of now, the personal data of subscribers has not been compromised. Our team will definitely compensate those subscribers who had no connection or could not use our services,” the firm added on social media.

“Yes, our enemies are cunning. But we are ready to face any challenges, overcome them and continue working for Ukrainians.”

Ukraine’s government confirmed to AFP that it started investigating the incident and that Russia was “suspected” of being behind it.

Both Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, and Netblocks, an internet monitoring firm, noticed disruptions on the Kyivstar internet network on December 12.

Additionally, Ukrainian payment system Monobank reported being targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack just a few hours after Kyivstar’s social media post.

At the time of writing, there is no evidence that these two events are related.

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This crafty iPhone attack makes you think your phone is safe…until it’s hacked

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Lockdown Mode, an iPhone feature introduced with iOS 16, is not an antivirus, does not detect malware, and cannot prevent malware from operating. 

Therefore, hackers can create a fake Lockdown Mode and run malware operating in the background unabated, a report from Jamf Threat Labs has noted.

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