Mega hack shuts down Putin’s online state media

Russian state broadcaster VGTRK was hit with an “unprecedented” hacking attack, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson said Monday. 

In the early hours of Monday morning, all of the company’s online broadcasting and internal services stopped working, including the streaming services of prominent TV and radio channels such as Russia-1 and Russia-24. 

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov expressed support for the Russian broadcasters and said specialists were working to determine who was responsible for the attack on what he called a “critical infrastructure facility.”

State-owned news outlet Gazeta.ru reported that the Ukrainian-linked hacker group “sudo rm -RF” was behind the attack.

The Russian state broadcaster’s press service acknowledged it had been the subject of a hack, but said “no significant damage was caused to the media holding’s operations.”

It added “everything is operating normally” again and that VGTRK specialists were “working to eliminate the consequences of this malicious interference.”