Ukrzaliznytsia sure that cyberattack on its systems carried out by Russia
Chairman of the board of JSC Ukrzaliznytsia Oleksandr Pertsovsky reported that he considers Russia to be the main suspect in the cyberattack.
"The railway has been under hostile attacks on physical infrastructure for the third year in a row. And there have already been many attempts to attack our cyberinfrastructure. And this time it was actually a directed, very well-planned, well-thought-out IT attack," Pertsovsky said at a press briefing on Monday.
According to him, all efforts were directed to minimize the impact on train traffic, and not a single train of Ukrzaliznytsia stopped for a minute. All trains ran on schedule. According to Ukrzaliznytsia research, the timeliness of train arrivals at the time of the cyberattack was 96%.
Pertsovsky stressed that at that time Ukrzaliznytsia drivers received their notifications about certain speed restrictions in manual format, station employees went to work in 2-3 shifts, working in a row, in order to accept all the cargo.
"Everyone saw, of course, our cashiers. We opened more than 120 additional ticket offices so that people could buy tickets. Cashiers (to serve them) came from everywhere, because the load on the ticket offices increased 4-5 times. But I want to emphasize that in addition to those you saw - our cashiers, our train crews, - practically every workplace of a railway worker has undergone changes," the chairman of the Ukrzaliznytsia board said.
In turn, the head of the State Center for Cyber Defense of the State Special Communications Service, Yevhenia Nakonechna, stated that the SBU is also currently investigating the case. However, the State Security Service is conducting a technical investigation to trace the tactics of hackers and prevent these events from recurring at critical facilities. She added that the implementation of such a cyber attack clearly required significant resources for its preparation.
In addition to investigating the cyber incident, the State Center for Cyber Defense provided technical support for recovery.
"Coordinated work with specialists from IT departments allowed us to restore service availability quite quickly, for such a company," she summarized.