Олександр Кузьменко Hot News 1 April 2025, 09:53

"Information will have to be collected bit by bit". Ukrzaliznytsia told how long it might take to fully restore all services after a large-scale Russian cyberattack

Oleksandr Pertsovsky, the chairman of the board of Ukrzaliznytsia, said that the large-scale cyberattack on the company was likely organized by Russian special services. He assured that they did not gain access to personal data of passengers and information about military cargo, and said how long it would take to fully restore UZ services.

Russian trace in the attack on Ukrzaliznytsia

«The railway has been under hostile attacks on physical infrastructure for the third year in a row. And there have already been many attempts to attack our cyber infrastructure. And this time it was actually a directed, very well-planned, well-thought-out IT attack», — Interfax-Ukraine reports the words of the head of Ukrzaliznytsia.

Oleksandr Pavlenko, Director of the «GIOC» branch of JSC «Ukrzaliznytsia», said that the cyberattack began at 5:30 a.m. on March 23 with a sudden loss of infrastructure monitoring, which was reported to the management by the next shift. Half an hour later, specialized specialists were already on site and began analyzing what had happened.

The head of the State Cyber Defense Center of the State Service for Special Communications, Yevgenia Nakonechna, said that «tools and methods inherent in Russian special services» were installed. She added that the SBU is currently investigating, and the SES is conducting a technical investigation to trace the hackers' tactics and prevent a repeat of these events at critical facilities.

According to her, the implementation of such a cyberattack required significant resources. Nakonechna emphasized that the investigation is still ongoing and official confirmation of those involved will come later.

At the same time, on March 31, there was a failure in the online services of the Moscow Metro, due to which Russians could not make payments, and a page with a message on behalf of Ukrzaliznytsia was displayed on the official website .

How long will it take to restore all Ukrzaliznytsia services?

«If we take into account all internal systems, it could take four to six weeks or even months. It will be difficult to restore our procurement system. New data was constantly being added there, technical descriptions of all our positions were being entered. Perhaps this information will have to be collected piece by piece. Clients will not feel it, but it is important for optimizing our processes», — Pertsovsky said in an interview with Forbes Ukraine.

According to him, UZ passenger services are planned to be restored by the end of this week. Freight services should be restored by April 10.

The head of Ukrzaliznytsia also assured that the enemy could not have obtained information about military transportation as a result of a cyberattack, because they are stored in closed systems that «predominantly have an analog format, not a digital one».

Oleksandr Pertsovsky says that since 2016, UZ has repelled hundreds of cyberattacks, but attacks of this level have never been recorded. It was the most well-planned and required large resources.

He also said that Kyivstar IT specialists approached Ukrzaliznytsia with an offer of assistance on their own initiative.

«Kyivstar specialists shared their experience in restoring from backups and gave us advice that allowed us to avoid the pitfalls that Kyivstar encountered during its restoration», — Pertsovsky noted.

As a reminder, on Sunday morning, March 23, Ukrzaliznytsia reported a failure in the company’s IT system. The company did not immediately indicate the reasons for the failure. In the morning, the chairman of the board of UZ admitted that an unprecedented cyberattack was carried out on the servers and IT resources of Ukrzaliznytsia — targeted, complex and multi-level. Online services are still not working.

Cyber experts also gave their first assessments of a large-scale hacker attack on the servers and IT infrastructure of Ukrzaliznytsia.

Chairman of the Board of UZ Oleksandr Pertsovsky said that the company is implementing compensation packages for passengers.