A hacker attack on the largest Ukrainian telecom operator Kyivstar led to the destruction of about 40% of its infrastructure, which caused a large-scale disruption, said company president Oleksandr Komarov at the NV event “Ukraine and the world ahead of 2024” in Kyiv on Thursday.

“They had two goals. The fundamental one was to destroy the infrastructure that was possible and sow such chaos. The destruction of the infrastructure was about 40%: the virtual layer of the network was very badly destroyed,” he said.

According to Komarov, because of the hackers' actions, the Custom User Data Base with internal profiles that help the system communicate was erased.

The president of Kyivstar noted that it was possible to restore the databases thanks to the backups that are created every day according to the protocol.

“At one o’clock in the morning we restored it all from these backups. We mobilized a thousand people for this recovery operation. In fact, this is quite unique. We coped with it,” Komarov said.

He emphasized that Kyivstar does not abandon its commitment to invest $600 million in the restoration and development of the telecom network in Ukraine, but noted that the company will rebuild the cyber defense system.

“We will completely change the approach to the cyber defense architecture of our company,” Komarov said.