Second Ukraine Power Outage Linked to Russian Hackers

A December cyber attack on the Pivnichna remote transmission facility in Kyiv caused an approximate one-hour blackout; published research presented at S4 attributes the incident to Russian state-linked hacking groups that used software-based attacks to shut down RTUs controlling circuit breakers. The report places the outage within a month-long campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure — including spear phishing against a bank and attacks on railways — and links techniques and artifacts (e.g., KillDisk, use of network administration tools) to prior 2015/2016 incidents.