Russia’s state media company VGTRK, which owns and operates the country’s main TV stations, was the target of a massive cyber attack 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 Broadcasting Company, was not loading on Monday, and its 24-hour news channel Rossiya-24 was not available online.
“503 Service unavailable. No servers are available to handle this request,” read an error message when Reuters reporters tried 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 restore operation.
“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,” he highlighted.
VGTRK commented earlier on Monday that its online service had suffered a cyber attack overnight. The company later did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Case would be action by Ukrainian hackers
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 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 unnamed source said the cyberattack targeted the internal and online services of VGTRK, which also owns and operates radio stations and many regional TV channels.
“Online transmission and internal services are down and even the Internet and telephony are not working. It will take a long time to fix,” the source said.
Speaking in Moscow, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, did not say who was behind the attack, but stressed that Russian media became the target of what she called “the collective West” a long time ago.
Finally, he highlighted that what happened was part of “a hybrid war”.
This content was originally published in Hacker attack interrupts Russian state media broadcast on Putin’s birthday on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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