Russia Says Its Own Emergency Alert App Was Hit by a 'Massive Cyberattack,' Hours After Ukraine's Was
First Kyiv's air raid app lied to Ukrainians on Sunday night. Early Monday, Moscow's Emergencies Ministry said its warning app — the one that tells Russians about incoming drones — had been breached the same way. Neither capital has established that the two attacks are connected.
Russia's Emergencies Ministry said early on Monday that its mobile application had been subjected to a massive cyberattack that allowed attackers to send false information to the public. 'Attention! The mobile application of the Ministry of Emergencies of Russia has been subjected to a massive cyber-attack, enabling attackers to send false information to the public,' the ministry posted on Telegram, in the statement the state news agency TASS carried and Reuters reported. The app is the channel the ministry uses to warn Russians of air raid alerts, incoming drone attacks and other emergency threats. The ministry said specialists were working to restore the app's normal operation.
The timing is the story. Hours earlier on Sunday evening, Ukraine's public air raid alert app was hacked in the same fashion, pushing false warnings of a radiation threat, a nuclear alert, a chemical attack and street fighting in Kyiv before officials shut the messages down — the attack this station covered on Sunday night. Now both wartime warning systems have been compromised inside a single night. What is not established, and what this story does not claim, is a connection: it was not immediately clear whether the incidents in Ukraine and Russia were linked. Ukraine's strategic communications centre blamed Russia for the attack on the Ukrainian app; Moscow, for its part, named no one for the attack on its own.
The practical damage in Russia, on the ministry's account, was contained to the app itself. Russia's broader public warning system was operating normally and had not been affected, the ministry said: residents continued to receive alerts through sirens and loudspeakers, text messages and television and radio broadcasts, and the situation was described as under control while the app was restored. That is the same shape Ukraine reported on Sunday — the sirens kept working while the phone screen lied. Two countries that warn their people by app have now each learned, on the same night, what happens when the app is the thing that gets attacked.
