Kyvistar’s CTO tells Mobile Europe how cyberattack in December 2023 caused a devastating outage but strong partnerships are playing a big part in its resurgence
Restoring mobile sites destroyed by Russian drone strikes is the “new reality” for Ukrainian operator Kyivstar after two years of war. But a cyberattack in December 2023 caused a devastating outage that disrupted services for days across the country.
The operator has become used to losing up to 10 sites every month in areas along the border with Russia and on the front line. “Yesterday, we lost around three sites and restored one,” said Volodymyr Lutchenko, Chief Technology Officer at Kyivstar, speaking to Mobile Europe at MWC.
The targeted, physical network damage impacts services only in those geographic areas while the rest of the network is “very stable and reliable,” he explained. However, the cyberattack on 12 December took down the entire network and affected services for 24 million people.
Partners join cyber recovery effort
Lutchenko shared some details about how long services were out. The operator recovered the fixed-line network in eight hours. But for the mobile network, it took 35 hours to restore voice services and 52 to 55 hours to restore data services.
“Total recovery [took] more time, but those were the times for the service restorations. It was incredible work by the team, who worked four to five days without any interruption or pause,” he said.
Kyivstar also had support from the country’s other operators as well as vendors Ericsson and ZTE during the network recovery. Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART) and Cisco’s Talos Incident Response also jumped into action to help.
“As soon as they learned we had been hit, they immediately proposed their support,” said Lutchenko.
He said it’s “very difficult” to be prepared for cyberattacks. “You have to win every battle, but your enemy has to win only once.”
“Any kind of defence can be breached, but the very important thing is how you react after that breach. That’s the experience we gained after this attack. I’m sure after this attack, we become stronger,” he said.
War not stopping network expansion
Lutchenko’s “number one” priority for this year continues to be keeping Kyivstar’s network up and running to provide communication services people need that are critical during the war. But it is not easy. To give an idea of what he and his colleagues are dealing with, he said the operator has lost three regional data centres housing “major core sites” in the last two years, the third of which was knocked out in January this year by a rocket attack.
In addition to focusing on network resilience and repairs, he is also determined to carry on with Kyivstar’s network strategy to build more coverage, capacity, and new services just as the operator would have before the Russian invasion in February 2022.
“We are not stopping our network development even during the war,” he said.
Kyivstar’s LTE network covers 95% of the population. The operator aims to expand that to 98% by the end of 2026 to provide “uninterrupted” LTE coverage along national and international roads as well as to “small villages”.
In June 2023, VEON Group and its subsidiary Kyivstar pledged to invest $600 million over the next three years to fund the Ukrainian operator’s infrastructure expansion, digital service development, and community support projects. Part of these funds will go towards building more fibre access and 4G network coverage. The operator is currently testing 5G.
Open to Open RAN
The $600 million investment will also support Kyivstar’s open RAN trials.
At MWC, Kyivstar signed a letter of intent with Rakuten Symphony to use the company’s open RAN technology. The agreement follows a previous tie-up between the Ukrainian operator and Rakuten Group, announced in August 2023, to collaborate on open RAN and digital services as part of Ukraine’s reconstruction.
“We’re always eager to discover new technologies. Open RAN is challenging the standard telco environment. We are in the stage of learning more details about this. The first step is to start lab tests and then small network proof of concept… It’s important to understand if it is easier or harder from a planning, operation, and maintenance point of view,” he said.
But the cooperation with Rakuten is “much wider” and not only about Open RAN. “Rakuten is a digital company,” he said.
Working together, Kyivstar sees opportunity to develop new consumer and B2B products. He pointed out that Rakuten’s Viber is already well established, installed on nine out of 10 smartphones, and heavily used in the country.
In January, Rakuten opened a new office in Kyiv. The Japanese group has software development and digital marketing teams in Ukraine for three of its businesses: Rakuten Viber, Rakuten Advertising and Rakuten Rewards.