14 DAY TRIAL // Ukraine experienced a new power outage during the weekend, and it’s believed that hackers are once again responsible, after they previously breached energy companies in 2015.
National energy company Ukrenergo experienced a power outage on Saturday night, with director Vsevolod Kovalchuk explaining in a post on Facebook that the blackout affected the northern part of Kiev and surrounding areas.
Kovalchuk explained that in order to deal with the problem, engineers at Ukrenergo switched to manual mode and started restoring power in approximately 30 minutes. The blackout was repaired in full an hour and fifteen minutes after it occurred, he said.
And now comes the most interesting part. Kovalchuk says responsible for the outage could be an “external interference through data network,” revealing that experts in the cyber security team are already working on this case and more information should be provided soon.
The 2015 attack
Back in 2015, a group of hackers managed to shut down the power grid in Ukraine after successfully infecting systems with malware and breaking down operating systems to prevent engineers from restoring them quickly.
Attackers used BlackEnergy and KillDisk, two forms of malware which were used to compromise the network and then to render systems unusable by making them impossible to boot. It took approximately 6 hours to completely restore power in Ukraine following the incident, with local security experts blaming Russia for the attack.
Kovalchuk says this time the power grid experienced “a failure in automation control,” and this is why it was necessary to switch to manual control. The same workaround was adopted one year ago as well, but it’s yet to be confirmed if a cyberattack happened the last weekend as well.
Also last year, it was revealed that energy and utility companies in Ukraine were under heavy attacks from foreign hackers, but most of these attempts were successfully blocked by the country’s IT security team.