Millions of Russians told to rush to bomb shelters – but it was all a ‘hack’

In Russia, air raid sirens sounded warning of an impending missile attack – but it turned out to be a ‘hack’.

Commercial radio stations in nearly a dozen cities called this morning with emergency alerts in at least four time zones.

The alleged civil defense siren said, “Look out, there’s an air raid siren. Go to the shelters immediately. Warning, warning, danger of missile attack.”

According to reports, it sounded in Pyatigorsk, Tyumen, Voronezh, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Magnitogorsk, Stary Oskol, Ufa, Belgorod, Novouralsk and a number of places in the Moscow region.

Images posted by Telegram channels Baza and Ostorozhno, Novosti, show citizens bracing for the warning from their car radios.

The message was broadcast by stations such as Russian FM2, Business FM and Comedy Radio, as well as by the Moscow stations AvtoRadio, Humor FM and Radio Culture.

Both federal and local authorities downplayed the broadcast, saying it was the work of hackers.

The regional government in Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, said: “Information about a missile strike and an air raid siren on one of the radio frequencies in Belgorod is fake.

“One of the radio stations was hacked in the morning of February 22, presumably from the Ukrainian side.”

While the Voronezh region blamed “Kiev regime henchmen” for the warning without any evidence, according to Baza.

Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said: “The hacking of the servers of several commercial radio stations in some regions of the country has led to information being broadcast about an alleged air raid alert and the threat of a missile strike.

“The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reports that this information is fake and does not correspond to reality.”

A spokesman for Gazprom Media, a company behind several hacked channels, said: “We are dealing with this problem. This will not happen again in the near future.”

It comes just a day after online broadcasts of Vladimir Putin’s lengthy State of the Union address to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s parliament, went offline.

Cyber ​​attackers targeted media outlets of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VG TRK), a state broadcaster.

Smotrim.ru, a live streaming platform that shows state broadcaster Rossiya-24, also went down, according to Russia’s state news agency Tass.

The outage was reportedly the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers flood a target’s servers with so much traffic that it collapses under its weight.

While it is unclear who or what is behind the outage, a pro-Ukrainian cyber war group has claimed responsibility.

Ukraine’s IT Army tweeted: “We launched a DDoS attack on channels showing Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly: 1TV, VGTRK and SMOTRIM.

Slava Ukraine.

.