According to local officials, Ukraine has been heavily targeted from the air and in cyberspace, including Kyivstar, a Ukrainian telecom company.
Local officials stated that almost 600 Russian mortars, rockets, and other missiles poured down on a southern part of Ukraine on Tuesday, while suspected hackers disrupted the country’s largest telecom provider’s phone and internet services.
Ukraine also claimed to have successfully hacked Russia’s national tax system.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared on Capitol Hill to press the United States Congress for greater military assistance, as fresh US funding is questionable due to a domestic political debate.
As winter approaches and hinders troop mobility, allowing little change along the front lines, air bombardment becomes more important in the conflict.
Cyberattacks are likewise a hotbed of activity. Kyivstar, a Ukrainian telecom company, spoke of a “powerful” hacking attack. Across the country, the corporation serves over 24 million mobile users.
“The war with Russia has many dimensions, and one of them is cyberspace,” said Kyivstar Director-General Oleksandr Komarov.
The company did not say when services would be restored. It stated that its professionals were collaborating with law enforcement authorities and special state services to resolve the issue.
Kyivstar traffic began to decline around 9 a.m. local time and was almost nothing by noon, according to Doug Madory, an analyst.
“Traffic was declining gradually rather than abruptly,” Madory told. He compared it to a March 2022 hack on Ukrtelecom, the country’s legacy telecom, which was then ranked seventh among Ukrainian carriers in terms of internet traffic volume.
According to Madory, Kyivstar is Ukraine’s most important internet traffic destination.
However, the attack had far-reaching implications. According to Ruslan Kravchenko, the head of the Kyiv regional administration, it interrupted the air raid warning system in a portion of the Kyiv region. Similar interruptions were observed in the Sumy region of northern Ukraine, and several ATMs of state-owned Oschadbank stopped working as a result of the Kyivstar attack.
In addition, a Ukrainian online bank reported surviving a major distributed denial-of-service attack on Tuesday. A DDoS assault uses a distributed network of computers to divert junk traffic to the target site in an attempt to render it unusable.
Simultaneously, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence claimed to have successfully carried out a cyber operation that infected Russia’s Federal Taxation Service systems with malware.
The operation, according to an intelligence agency statement, accessed many central servers and over 2,300 regional servers, disrupting communication inside Russia’s taxation system and destroying its database and backups.
Moscow offered no immediate response to the incident, and the report could not be independently corroborated.
In addition, Ukraine claimed to have taken control of a strategically significant hill in the Donetsk region, where the front line has scarcely moved since 2014.
Zelenskyy reported on social media that his soldiers had captured the foothold, which affords a vantage position over the front line near Pivdenne, a mining village northwest of Horlivka, Donetsk.
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