Nikita Veselkov, Lead Technical Specialist at ESET in Ukraine, told how Russian hackers attempted to compromise Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in October 2024. According to him, only Eset was investigating 4 energy companies at the time.
Nikita Veselkov, Lead Technical Specialist at ESET in Ukraine, told how Russian hackers attempted to compromise Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in October 2024. According to him, only Eset was investigating 4 energy companies at the time.
The specialist does not know exactly how many other companies were investigated.
«But almost all of Ukraine’s energy sector was under the spotlight,» he stated. «I remember today, it was October 2024, I’m at a conference, I have a speech in 10 minutes. The guys from our team call me, they say they talked to the antivirus laboratory, something is happening there. I looked at the letter, realized that this was something very global, and we started targeting energy companies.»
ESET specialists then began to conduct an investigation, they collected file samples, information about threats, began to transmit them in real time to companies, and literally communicate by phone with researchers.
«And by the evening we already had a record of the main part of this attack that needed to be blocked, which we passed on to companies in the energy sector,» the expert said.
According to him, the researchers rejected the version about insiders, and companies that could have launched hackers into the system. The attackers looked for vulnerabilities in the systems from the outside.
