Hacker attack disrupts Russian state media broadcasts on Putin’s birthday

Russian state company VGTRK, which owns and operates the country’s major television stations, was the target of a massive cyberattack on Monday, which a Ukrainian government source said was caused by hackers from Kiev.

The website of VGTRK, the all-Russian state television and radio company, was not loading on Monday and its 24-hour news channel Rossiya-24 was not available online.

“503 Service Unavailable. No server available to handle this request,” read an error message when Reuters journalists attempted to access the live stream.

“Our state media holding, one of the largest, faced an unprecedented hacker attack on its digital infrastructure,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, saying VGTRK was working to overcome the consequences.

“Experts are working to uncover all the circumstances, to understand where the traces left by those who organized this hacker attack on the critical infrastructure object lead.”

VGTRK, which said on Monday that its online service suffered a cyberattack overnight and whose news channels provide many Russians with news about the war in Ukraine, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

A Ukrainian government source said Ukrainian hackers were responsible for the incident, which coincided with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 72nd birthday.

“Ukrainian hackers ‘congratulated’ Putin on his birthday by carrying out a large-scale attack on Russia’s state television and radio company,” the source told Reuters, asking not to be identified.

Reuters was unable to independently verify this claim.

According to Gazeta.ru, a Russian news agency, an anonymous source said the cyber attack targeted the internal and online services of VGTRK, which also owns and operates radio stations and many regional television channels.

“Online broadcasts and internal services are not working and the Internet and telephony are also not working. It will take a long time to fix them,” the source said.

Speaking in Moscow, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, did not say who was behind the attack, but that Russian media had long been in the crosshairs of what she called “the collective West” and said that what happened is part of “a hybrid war”.

Source: Terra

Rose

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