Finger of blame pointed at hackers over new Ukraine power outage

Ukrainians in Kyiv left in the cold after a substation went offline

Homes and businesses in parts of northern Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, were blacked out over the weekend in an outage that has been blamed on hackers.

The claims come after a substation in the region was unaccountably cut-off from the main power grid. However, the local power company, Kyivenergo, was able to re-connect the substation in just over an hour, although it hasn't been able to definitively confirm the claim that hackers were behind it. Equipment failure has also been touted as a cause.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't be the first time that electricity shortages in parts of Ukraine have been attributed to hackers, with the country's energy infrastructure facing repeated attacks since 2014.

Furthermore, suggested Moreno Carullo, co-founder and chief technical officer at security company Nozomi Networks, the latest outage bears similarities to previous attacks.

"These reports are reminiscent of an attack experienced at a similar time last December that left 225,000 Ukrainians cold at Christmas."

Substations, he continued, are often a weak point in a country's energy infrastructure as they are not only remote, but often remotely managed. "While some are completely disconnected, and are therefore considered safe from cyberattack, others form part of a Smart Grid which means they are part of a fully connected series of systems to allow for improved efficiency of the power grid," said Carullo.

Ukraine's energy infrastructure has repeatedly been the target of cyber attacks in recent years, with a number of power companies attacked over Christmas last year, leading to a black out in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. The finger of blame has been pointed at attackers coming from Russia.

Ukraine's power infrastructure was also attacked in September 2014, when the BlackEnergy malware was propagated via infected Microsoft Word documents in a phishing campaign.

It comes against the backdrop of a continuing war in Eastern Ukraine, in which separatists backed by Russia are fighting to secede. That followed the annexation of the Crimea region by Russia in 2014.

The Ukrainian government's battle against the separatists has been undermined by a combination of official secrecy and endemic corruption that sees funds ear-marked for the war siphoned off by politicians and bureaucrats.