Millions of Russians are told to rush to air raid shelters due to imminent missile attack after radio stations are hacked
- Emergency message came on many commercial stations in cities across Russia
- Russians were told to ‘go to shelters immediately’ due to threat of attack in hack
Millions of Russians were today told to rush to air raid shelters because of an imminent missile attack after radio stations were hacked.
The emergency message came on many commercial stations in multiple cities across at least four time zones in Russia.
It follows an embarrassing hacking attack yesterday that saw Vladimir Putin’s keynote state of the nation speech being blacked out on the online sites of major state TV stations.
Today’s message interrupted programmes to announce with a siren blaring: ‘An air alert is being announced. Everyone, go to the shelters immediately. Attention! Attention! The threat of a missile strike.’
Among the cities hit were Belgorod, Stary Oskol, Ufa, Kazan, Novouralsk, Novosibirsk, Pyatigorsk, Tyumen, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, and Magnitogorsk, and a number of places in Moscow region.
Millions of Russians were today told to rush to air raid shelters because of an imminent missile attack after radio stations were hacked
‘Information about a missile strike and an air alert on one of the radio frequencies in Belgorod is fake,’ said the regional government in Belgorod, which borders Ukraine and has seen real attacks in recent months.
‘One of the radio stations on the morning of February 22 was hacked, presumably from the Ukrainian side.’
Yet it was unclear where the hacking attack came from.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry said: ‘A hacker attack on the servers of several commercial radio stations in some regions of the country resulted in the airing of information about an alleged air raid alert and the threat of a missile strike.
‘The Russian Emergencies Ministry reports that this information is fake and does not correspond to reality.’
Among the stations hit across different regions were Energy FM, Relax FM, Business FM, Humour FM and Autoradio.
Yuri Peryazev, the head of the Civil Defence and Emergency Situations of the Sovetsky district, Novosibirsk denied any missile strikes in Siberia.
‘We’re doing fine. There is no air alert,’ he said.
‘We are dealing with this issue,’ said a spokesman for Gazprom Media, which is behind several hacked stations.
‘This will not happen again in the near future.’
It came after Putin was blacked out by a ‘major hack’ across Russia while delivering his state-of-the-union speech yesterday, with a message on blank screens blaming ‘technical works’.
Instead of Putin’s speech, a notice on screen announced ‘Mistake 500’ and that ‘Technical works’ were underway
It follows an embarrassing hacking attack yesterday that saw Vladimir Putin’s keynote state of the nation speech being blacked out on the online sites of major state TV stations
The web links of main state channels, which are part of All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company [VGTRK], were hit by the hack.
Instead of Putin’s speech, a notice on screen announced ‘Mistake 500’ and that ‘Technical works’ were underway.
There was no immediate official confirmation of hacking – but it appeared a major problem had hit the state broadcaster across all 11 of Russia’s time zones.
The state-run RIA Novosti news agency said the outage was the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
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