Kyivstar cyberattack (2023)
Destructive attack of December 12, 2023 on Ukraine's largest mobile operator, attributed to Russian military intelligence: a war operation against a civilian company.
On December 12, 2023, Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator, lost voice, mobile data and part of its related services at once, including some air raid alert systems. Ukraine's security service attributed the attack to the Sandworm group, part of Russian military intelligence, and said the attackers had been inside the network for months before destroying a large part of the virtual infrastructure. It is an almost pure case of what cyber war clauses target: an operation by a state at war, against a civilian company, whose effect goes beyond the company to reach the functioning of a country. For the underwriter, the case matters beyond the exclusion: a telecoms operator is a critical provider, and its outage becomes the business interruption of thousands of insureds who suffered no direct attack.
On 12 December 2023, the operator served about 24 million mobile subscribers, left without a network for several days. Service came back in stages, voice first, then data, which gives the measure of a cascading business interruption for its business customers.
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