Ukraine investigates possible internet attack on Kiev energy grid

The Ukrainian government is investigating a possible internet attack on its energy grid, the director of the national energy company Ukrenergo confirmed to Reuters news agency. On Sunday, a distribution station was shut down for unknown reasons.

According to the CEO, there are two possible explanations for the outage, which led to a loss of 200MW of power. That equates to about a fifth of the power absorbed in Kiev overnight. For example, on the one hand it is possible that it was a hardware failure, on the other hand it could be ‘external factors’, which indicates an internet attack. Because technicians have found unknown data in the power company’s log files, the latter possibility is more likely, according to Reuters.

The outage involved a distribution station near the capital Kiev, which left the northern part of the city without electricity. According to a Facebook post from the director, the outage lasted just over an hour. No conclusions can yet be drawn about the cause, says the CEO. However, the incident is said to be “something new, which experts have not encountered before.”

It would not be the first time that Ukraine’s energy supply has been the target of an internet attack. A year ago, 700,000 people were temporarily without power when the BlackEnergy malware caused a power plant to shut down.