KEY POINTS
- Several Russian state websites were down during Putin’s Tuesday speech
- The outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack
- Volunteer hacking group IT Army of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the incident
A Ukrainian hacker group has claimed responsibility for taking down the online streams of Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s Tuesday state of the nation address.
The website of the government-owned All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company was inaccessible for some time during the speech delivered before the Russian parliament, Reuters reported.
Russian state-owned live-streaming platform Smotrim, which broadcasts the government-run Russia-24 channel, also went offline, according to the outlet.
Both websites appeared to be back online, Business Insider reported.
Attempts to open the VGTRK’s website during the affected periods revealed the message “Technical work is underway,” according to a report by the Russian state media agency TASS.
The outage was the result of a distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack, Russia’s government-owned RIA Novosti news outlet reported.
American DDoS mitigation company Cloudflare defined such an attack as a “malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.”
Ukrainian volunteer hacker group IT Army of Ukraine has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s outage.
“Great job! We launched a DDoS attack on channels showing Putin’s address to the federal assembly,” the group said in a Twitter post.
Another hacking group claiming to be working for jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has reportedly stepped forward and taken responsibility for the attack as well.
In a similar story from late last year, a radio station in Russian-occupied Crimea played Ukraine’s national anthem during a compromised broadcast.
Hackers attacked the online broadcast of Radio Crimea on Aug. 30, 2022, and Ukraine’s national anthem was reportedly played on the radio.
Another attack occurred more than two months prior when hackers took control of the radio broadcast of the Russian newspaper Kommersant, disrupting a news bulletin and playing Ukrainian and anti-war songs.
During the compromised broadcast, hackers reportedly played Ukraine’s national anthem, the Ukrainian patriotic march “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow” and the song “We Don’t Need War,” performed by the Russian rock band Nogu Svelo!
