Ukraine's railways restore half of IT services hit by cyber attack so far

KYIV (Reuters) - Ukrainian state railways Ukrzaliznytsia, the country’s largest cargo carrier, said on Wednesday that it had managed to restore only about half of its IT services hit by a large-scale cyber attack in late March.

An outage was first reported on March 23 when the rail company notified passengers about a failure in its IT system and advised them to buy tickets on site or on trains.

The company later said its online systems had been subjected to a large-scale targeted cyber attack.

A Ukrainian security official and a senior government source, both speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack looked like it had been carried out by Russia, which began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and now holds about 20% of its territory.

Valeriy Tkachev, deputy head of the commercial department of Ukrzaliznytsia, said the company needs "one or two weeks" to restore all services.

Ukrzaliznytsia said in late March that it had restored the online ticket sales system.

 (Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; editing by Mark Heinrich)