The Dutch company VEON, which owns Ukrainian mobile operator Kyivstar, has announced that losses from a cyberattack and network failure in December last year reached almost $100 million.
It is noted that VEON and Kyivstar have conducted a financial impact assessment, the preliminary results of which have become available, Ekonomichna Pravda reports.
The company does not expect a significant financial impact on its consolidated results for the past year. However, VEON believes that the loss of revenue due to customer loyalty measures taken by Kyivstar to compensate for the inconvenience caused by the disruption will have an impact on its consolidated revenue results for 2024.
The revenue impact of these proposals is estimated at approximately UAH 3.6 billion (approximately USD 95 million).
What is known about the attack on Kyivstar
- The attack on Kyivstar took place on the morning of 12 December. Initially, there were reports of a large-scale outage at the mobile operator.
- Later, a powerful hacking attack was called the cause of the large-scale failure. Kyivstar insisted that its customers' personal data was safe.
- Later, the company said that hackers had breached Kyivstar's cyber defences through a compromised account of one of its employees.
- The company said it would compensate subscribers for the failure and allocate UAH 100 million to the Armed Forces.
- Kyivstar filed a lawsuit against Russian hackers for interference with its network in connection with a large-scale outage caused by a hacker attack.
- The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that Russian hackers had penetrated the system of the Ukrainian telecommunications operator Kyivstar at least as long ago as in May last year, although the large-scale attack took place on 12 December, but the company denied this information.