Russia’s Sandworm crew appear to have been responsible for knocking out mobile and internet services to about 24 million users in Ukraine last month with an attack on telco giant Kyivstar.
The criminals lurked in the telco’s systems for at least six months leading up to the attack, then wiped “almost everything,” according to Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) cyber security department. In an interview published on Thursday, the spy chief reported that the “disastrous” intrusion, which wiped thousands of the operator’s virtual servers and PCs, began long before Kyivstar’s services went dark on December 12.
