Russia’s RuTube Offline for Second Day by Victory Day Cyberattack

RuTube, Russia’s reply to YouTube, was crippled for a second day on Tuesday by a cyber assault whose timing it linked to this week’s anniversary celebrations of victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Usually full of video content material, RuTube’s web site is at the moment black, with a brief message studying: “Attention! The site is undergoing technical work. The site was attacked. At the moment the situation is under control. User data has been saved.”

The assault started on Monday, a serious nationwide vacation when Russia commemorated the Soviet victory over Adolf Hitler and President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech likening that wrestle to the present conflict in Ukraine.

“Someone really wanted to prevent RuTube from showing the Victory Day parade and celebratory fireworks,” RuTube stated. “It is not a sin to remember the battles our guys won. The battle for RuTube continues.”

It described the cyberattack because the worst within the web site’s historical past.

In a separate incident on Monday, Russian satellite tv for pc tv menus have been hacked to indicate viewers in Moscow messages about occasions in Ukraine, together with “You have blood on your hands”, in accordance with screenshots obtained by Reuters.

The web sites of state-owned firms and information web sites have fallen beneath sporadic hacking efforts since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, typically to indicate info that’s at odds with Moscow’s official line on what it calls a “special military operation”.

RuTube stated a big group was working to revive the service, and denied reviews it had misplaced the web site’s supply code.

The lengthy outage goes some solution to explaining why Russia has not but blocked Alphabet’s YouTube, regardless of repeatedly fining and warning the US service over its removing of some state-backed Russian channels and for failing to delete content material Moscow deems unlawful.

Russia restricted entry to Twitter and Meta Platform’s Facebook and Instagram in early March.

Critics have beforehand informed Reuters that RuTube, regardless of its weekly consumer numbers leaping in early March as different international social media have been pressured out of the Russian market, nonetheless has an extended solution to go to rival Google’s video product.

© Thomson Reuters 2022