livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
Ukrainian Power Company ‘99% Certain’ Blackout Result of Cyber Attack
As Russia seizes the stage, the lights are going out in Ukraine. On Sunday morning around midnight a major blackout struck the power substation in Novi Petrivtsi, a village near Kiev, disrupting power to between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, acting director of Ukrenergo power company, said that the company was able to get the service restored relatively easily, within an hour and fifteen minutes. He told Defense One he was “99 percent” certain a deliberate attack caused the blackout.
Sunday night’s power outage echoes one that occurred roughly a year ago, affecting more than 225,000 people Ukraine. A shadowy Pro-Russian group called Sandworm emerged as the most likely culprit.
“On December 18, 2016, a transmission substation serving the Ukrainian capital de-energized, leaving roughly one-fifth of Kiev without power. Official company communication listed ‘hacking’ and ‘equipment failure’ as possible causes. While details are still sparse, the improbability of the simultaneous loss of three transmission lines lead us to assess with low confidence that a cyber attack was the root cause,” said FireEye’s Sean McBride, who added, “Nevertheless, we note significant dissimilarities between this and the 2015 outages.”
Ukrainian Power Company ‘99% Certain’ Blackout Result of Cyber Attack
As Russia seizes the stage, the lights are going out in Ukraine. On Sunday morning around midnight a major blackout struck the power substation in Novi Petrivtsi, a village near Kiev, disrupting power to between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, acting director of Ukrenergo power company, said that the company was able to get the service restored relatively easily, within an hour and fifteen minutes. He told Defense One he was “99 percent” certain a deliberate attack caused the blackout.
Sunday night’s power outage echoes one that occurred roughly a year ago, affecting more than 225,000 people Ukraine. A shadowy Pro-Russian group called Sandworm emerged as the most likely culprit.
“On December 18, 2016, a transmission substation serving the Ukrainian capital de-energized, leaving roughly one-fifth of Kiev without power. Official company communication listed ‘hacking’ and ‘equipment failure’ as possible causes. While details are still sparse, the improbability of the simultaneous loss of three transmission lines lead us to assess with low confidence that a cyber attack was the root cause,” said FireEye’s Sean McBride, who added, “Nevertheless, we note significant dissimilarities between this and the 2015 outages.”
Ukrainian Power Company ‘99% Certain’ Blackout Result of Cyber Attack
