This was said by the head of the SBU’s cybersecurity department, Ilya Vityuk, at the Kiev International Cybersecurity 2024 Forum, Ukrinform reported. Army Inform.

“Today there is not enough evidence or basis to claim that one of the largest cyber attacks against the Kyivstar mobile operator in December 2023 was carried out from the inside and not from the outside. The fact of how they moved in the network and how they raised the authority proves that this could have been done much faster if there was a serious insider.” said Vytiuk.

Russian hackers have been online since at least May 2023, according to the head of the SBU’s cybersecurity department.

“It is not possible to say anything definitive at the moment, but maybe this infiltration took place in March and you can see how long the preparation process was required to reach such a serious level during the attack,” Vytiuk added.

The head of the cybersecurity department noted that the second wave planned by the enemy was made impossible thanks to the SBU’s participation in neutralization and subsequent recovery from the first hours of the “Kyivstar” attack.

“The second wave of the attack could lead to base stations, which are thousands of Kievstar base stations, being reset to zero, resulting in each base station having to be manually visited and rebooted,” he said.

Currently, the investigation is still ongoing and, according to Vityuk, will continue for a very long time because hundreds of servers were destroyed and thousands of computers were completely wiped during the attack.

As reported, on December 12, the operator “Kyivstar” was subjected to a powerful hacker attack, which led to a technical malfunction. Communication and internet access services became unusable.

Photo: ArmyInform