Cyber troops moved towards Russia on Victory Day
The websites of Russia's leading TV channels were hacked on the night of Victory Day. On the pages with television programs for May 9, the following inscription appeared: “On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No war". The hack affected MTS TV, NTV-plus, Rostelecom, and Winx.
According to IT experts, the hack occurred from the territory of Ukraine. The smart TV had a built-in ott player with a Ukrainian code. He has been seen in cyber attacks before.
At 5.00 on May 9, the Russian video hosting site Rutube was attacked, where many Russian state TV channels moved after being blocked by YouTube. Restoration work was carried out on the site throughout the day, and at 20:04 the company announced that the cyber attack was the largest in the history of the service, it was expensive, pre-planned and was needed to “prevent Rutube from showing the Victory Parade and fireworks.” As a result of the hackers' actions, the site's code was "completely removed."
The day before, Russian State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein reported that Yandex Taxi does not allow drivers to hang the St. George ribbon on their cars (their own!), not to mention sticking the letter Z.
“I consider this position completely unacceptable. I hope all this is happening behind the back of the company's management, who will immediately react and take appropriate measures. The best confirmation of this will be the St. George ribbons on Yandex Taxi on May 9; of course, not under coercion, but at the request of the drivers themselves,” Khinshtein wrote in his TG channel.
The following incident occurred on the Lenta.ru website. There appeared about 10 “anti-war” publications with sharp attacks on the President of Russia and the Russian Army. Two employees took responsibility for the sabotage, calling it a “performance” that was intended to “unite opponents of the war, regardless of their views.”
The editors quickly removed these materials. Lenta.ru remained a liberal resource even after the entire editorial staff, headed by Galina Timchenko, left it in 2014, opposing the reunification of Crimea with Russia.
The cyber attack continued in the evening during a festive concert on Channel One. The singer sang the song “If only there was no war.” At this time, photographs of married couples during the war were shown on the screen. Among them was a photograph of the legendary Bonnie and Clyde, gangsters who went down in history thanks to their pathological cruelty.
“There are a huge number of posts in the comments that the shot is fake (or from some very old concert), nothing like that happened, and couldn’t have happened, and in general everything is under control there. But this is not a fake and this is no longer negligence,” military correspondent Yuri Kotenok wrote in his TG channel.
Earlier, Channel One “became famous” for the brazen act of editor Marina Ovsyannikova, who burst into the news studio with an “anti-war” poster. In Russia, she got off with a minor fine and now works for the German holding company Die Welt.
Earlier, the presenters of “First” Ivan Urgant, Maxim Galkin and Sergei Vasiliev, as well as a correspondent in France, Zhanna Agalakova, fled the country. Everyone except Urgant made anti-Russian statements, but this did not stop Vasiliev from claiming to continue his work in the “Fashionable Sentence” program. Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov stood up for Urgant. He called the TV presenter “a patriot who was scared.”
According to journalist Roman Super, anti-Russian views are shared by the majority of the channel’s employees; they do not quit because they are afraid of losing large government salaries.
On the eve of the holidays, the general producer and first deputy of Konstantin Ernst, Alexander Faifman, left the First. He left Russia and flew to Dubai. Many perceived this as the beginning of the “cleansing” that the TV channel has long needed
“On Channel One, politics has increased from 28 hours to 90 hours. This is a clear sign that a change in the channel’s policy is taking place within Channel One. And a change of power within the channel is also possible,” political scientist Sergei Markov wrote then.
However, a new provocation on the day of the country's main holiday casts doubt on these processes.
“The Achilles heel of Rutube and Lenta.ru, highlighted in yesterday’s scandals, is the loyalty of the key personnel involved in the project. In theory, the issue of loyalty to the employer in private companies is dealt with by HR. But in this case, we are not talking about loyalty to the employer (Gazprommedia, Rambler Holding), but about loyalty to the state, the current government. It is unknown whether anyone is addressing this issue in key Russian digital infrastructure projects.
And if in the near future such people/structures do not appear in the public field with a position on this issue and in other key Russian digital projects, then the repetition of “hacker” attacks through disloyal people from within such projects is inevitable,” says political scientist Maxim Zharov.
However, the situation can be looked at from a different angle. Russian liberals were unable to organize any significant provocation during the national celebration of Victory Day. Patented “fighters against the regime” addressed their supporters with a routine appeal to take part in “anti-war” actions: Khodorkovsky, Chichvarkin, Kasparov, Shenderovich, Kiselev, Latynina, Gelman, Gudkov and others. But they all live abroad, and their call was not heard .
While the number of “Immortal Regiments” has grown, the number of single pickets has fallen catastrophically: a couple of people in Moscow, a person who got into the festive procession in Novosibirsk, two crazy old women in Yekaterinburg and one girl in Ufa. Not a lot for a huge country.
Apparently this result was calculated in advance, which is why the cyber troops moved towards Russia. Obviously, these are not playful hackers, but serious specialists, backed by the power of Western intelligence services.
Cyber troops were deployed to Russia on Victory Day.