Russian authorities blamed Ukrainian hackers for the air raid sirens that played over multiple commercial radio stations and ordered millions of Russians in multiple cities to rush to air raid shelters.
The air raid alerts were heard on multiple radio stations in the Russian cities of Pyatigorsk, Tyumen, Voronezh, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Magnitogorsk, Stary Oskol, Ufa and Novouralsk, according to the Telegram account of the Russian news outlet Ostorozhno, Novosti.
“Attention: an air raid alert is in effect. Proceed to shelters immediately. Attention, attention, missile strike threat,” a voice was heard saying on the fake air raid alert.
Among the Russian radio stations that suffered attacks from hackers were Energy FM, Relax FM, Business FM, Humour FM and Autoradio.
Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations confirmed that the radio stations were hacked.
“As a result of a hacker attack on the servers of a number of commercial radio stations in some regions of the country, information was broadcast on the air about the alleged announcement of an air raid and the threat of a missile attack,” the Russian ministry said.
Authorities in the Russian region of Voronezh said the emergency announcement was not genuine and accused “collaborators of the Kyiv regime” of hacking the radio stations, the outlet reported.
The regional government of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, also accused Ukrainians of being behind the radio hacking incident. However, it is unclear where the hacking attack came from.
Gazprom Media, which operates several of the hacked radio stations, vowed to investigate the incident and prevent the attacks from happening again, the Daily Mail reported.
The incident comes as Ukrainian hackers claimed responsibility for taking down online streams of Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s state of the nation address, which took place ahead of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The websites of Russian state-run broadcasting companies went offline at the height of Putin’s speech.
In some of the live streams, a notice was shown with the texts “mistake 500” and “technical works.”
According to Russia’s government-owned RIA Novosti news outlet, the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack.
IT Army of Ukraine claimed on its Twitter account that it caused the DDoS incident amid the Russian leader’s highly-anticipated speech.
These were not the only instances of Russia reporting hacking incidents allegedly caused by Ukrainians.
In 2022, a radio station in Russian-occupied Crimea was hacked and broadcasted Ukraine’s national anthem.
Hackers also gained access to a radio broadcast of the Russian newspaper Kommersant, disrupted its news program and played Ukrainian and anti-war songs.
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