Kyiv airport goes dark after ‘BlackEnergy-linked’ power outage
The attacks come from 2007-09, so they pre-date the Obama-Xi agreement a year ago. “Yesterday, the communications specialists established that one of the workstations at the Boryspil airport was infected by the BlackEnergy virus”, said a spokesperson this weekend.
The malware was part of a sophisticated malware attack against the Ukrainian power grid system, which led to blackouts in the Ivano-Frankivsk, Horodenka, Kalush, Dolyna, Kosiv, Tysmenytsia, Nadvirna, and Yaremche regions.
The assault on Boryspil airport is said to be similar to an attack on three Ukrainian energy firms in December which plunged parts of the country into darkness.
While there is no suggestion the Russian government is involved, the attacks have occurred during a period of bad relations between Ukraine and Russia.
A cyber-attack on Kyiv’s main airport was launched from a server in Russia, Ukraine’s military spokesman told Reuters on Monday, as the state-run Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) warned of the threat of further attacks.
While it’s worrying that the attack was on the same network as the airport’s air traffic control processes, according to the report, it was caught early and no damage was done.
“Attention: system administrators present a short list of indicators [that] network systems and networks [have been] compromise[d] with BlackEnergy malware”, CERT-UA said in an advisory (according to Google translation of Ukrainian language original here).
On December 23rd, electricity was cut for six hours to about 80,000 people in and around Ivano-Frankivsk, a city of some 230,000 people about 200km from the Polish border.
A new model for attributing cyber attacks (from Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan).
Ukraine’s SBU state security service has blamed Russian Federation, but the energy ministry said it would hold off on attribution until after it completes a formal probe.
HAS accused unfriendly neighbour Russian Federation of hacking into computing systems at Kyiv airport.