(Reuters) – Ukraine’s biggest mobile operator, hit by a mass cyberattack this week, said on Friday that it had restored mobile internet throughout Ukraine and restored international roaming.
In a statement on Facebook, Kyivstar said it was working on restoring SMS text messaging. The network, it said, was operating on all standards, including 4G.
“This means that the quality of all communications will soon improve, even if it is now working at reduced speed,” the statement said.
“In some localities, there could still be short-term difficulties with communications. But our specialists are eliminating them quickly.”
Kyivstar’s Dutch-based parent company Veon Ltd. had in an earlier statement announced the resumption of services.
Kyivstar CEO Oleksandr Komarov said on Thursday that the company might need several weeks to reinstate all its services after the attack.
Tuesday’s attack on Kyivstar, which counts more than half of Ukraine’s population as mobile subscribers, knocked out services and damaged IT infrastructure and air raid alert systems in several regions.
Komarov said customer data was not compromised.
On Wednesday, a group called Solntsepyok, believed by Ukraine’s security service SBU to be affiliated with Russian military intelligence, said in a post on the Telegram messenger app that it carried out the attack.
Kyivstar’s CEO said the hackers used an employee’s compromised account for the attack but how exactly they got access to it is being investigated.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski; editing by Grant McCool)
