RuTube Hack: Anonymous Claims Cyberattack on Russian Video Streaming Site on Victory Day

Russia's leading video streaming website RuTube suffered a severe slowdown in its services for three days due to a massive cyberattack.

Anonymous, a hacker collective, claimed responsibility for the attack. RuTube, on the other hand, has denied losing its source code as a result of the incident.

RuTube, a Kremlin-friendly alternative to YouTube, got back online Wednesday afternoon after being offline since Monday. The video streaming site claimed it had been the victim of the biggest cyberattack it has ever seen in postings on its official Telegram channel.

The site is still hard to load, and when full service will be restored is unknown.

RuTube Will Take Time To Recover From Massive Attack

RuTube, which has 25 million active monthly users, said, "Restoring (access) will take more time than engineers first thought." Its website rutube.ru posted a notice that it was working on getting its services running in normal conditions, according to a Moscow Times report.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin calls a "special military operation," has prompted a near-constant stream of low-level cyberattacks on websites in both countries, per NBC News.

DDoS assaults typically slow down or take websites down for a short period. More destructive cyberattacks, such as the one that paralyzed RuTube for days, are significantly less common.

In Telegram messages, RuTube stated that the attack was carried out to prevent Russians from watching the Victory Day parade on Monday and that the perpetrator was a state-sponsored hacker organization.

The corporation also announced that it had recruited Positive Technologies, a Russian cybersecurity firm that the United States sanctioned last year after accused it of dealing with Russian intelligence. Positive Technologies and RuTube did not reply to requests for comment.

Ukraine Praises Cyberattacks on Russia

On their Telegram channels, the IT Army and Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, who has previously expressed his support for the hacker organization, lauded the RuTube hack but denied responsibility.

Ukraine's government has even given the "IT Army," a group of so-called hacktivists, permission to conduct attacks on targets it wants to flood with online traffic regularly.

According to RepublicWord, since Russia's armed aggression in Ukraine began on February 24, hackers have been attacking the country. In the early days of the battle, Anonymous claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that took down several official government websites, including one belonging to the Ministry of Defense.

Anonymous is also suspected of orchestrating a broadcast of the Ukrainian national anthem on various Russian state television stations.

On Monday, Ukrainian media published photos showing a hack of Russian television channels MTS, NTV-Plus, Rostelecom, and Winx, with a message that read, "The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their children is on your hands. Television and the authorities are lying. No to war."

On Monday, lenta.ru, a generally Kremlin-friendly news website, briefly published a message decrying Russia's "bloody and absurd" military invasion of Ukraine.

The text was promptly removed after two of its journalists signed it.

Journalists Egor Polyakov and Alexandra Miroshnikova said they "are now looking for work, lawyers, and maybe political asylum."

With the help of Microsoft and other Western firms, Ukraine recently successfully prevented Russian military hackers from causing damage to one of the country's electricity suppliers.

Tags

Anonymous, Cyberattack, Russia, Ukraine