Russian state-owned VGTRK, which owns and operates the country’s main national TV stations, was the target of a cyber attack this Monday, October 7th. According to Reuters, a Ukrainian government source attributed the attack to Kiev hackers.
The website of VGTRK, the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, was unavailable on Monday morning and its news channel Rossiya-24 was not available online.
“503 Service Unavailable. No servers are available to handle this request,” read an error message on the online broadcast website.
“Our state media holding, one of the largest, attacked 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 find out where the trails of those who organized this hacker attack lead to a critical infrastructure object.”
VGTRK, which said its online service suffered a cyberattack overnight, preventing the Russian population, who use its channels, from following news about the war in Ukraine.
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 the Russian state television and broadcasting company,” the source told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Russian news channel Gazeta.ru cited an unnamed source as saying the cyberattack targeted the online and internal services of VGTRK, which also owns radio opera stations and many regional TV channels.
“Online broadcasting and internal services are offline and even the Internet and telephony are not working. It will take a long time to fix,” the source quoted the source as saying.
“I heard that they (the hackers) wiped everything from the servers, including the backups.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, did not say who was behind the attack, but told reporters that Russian media had long engaged targets of what she called the “Collective West” and said that what happened which was part of “a hybrid war”.
Moscow intends to raise the cyber attack for discussion in all international forums, including UNESCO, the UN agency that promotes freedom of expression, Zakharova said.
Russian state media attacked by hacker on Putin’s birthday
