False Radiation Warnings Hit Ukraine's Alert App, Then Russia Says Its App Was Hacked Too
Ukraine's air-raid app sent fabricated nuclear, chemical and street-fighting alerts on Sunday night. Hours later Russia reported a massive cyberattack on its own emergency app. The alerts landed the night a six-day Kherson ceasefire expired.
Ukraine was the first to report the problem, telling residents to ignore false warnings issued through its official air-raid alert app on Sunday night, the BBC reported. From about 10:47 p.m. Kyiv time, the Air Alarm app broadcast warnings residents had no reason to expect in that form: a radiation threat for Kyiv, followed by fake warnings of a chemical attack and street fighting in the capital, according to the BBC's reconstruction read by this desk.
The Ukrainian Air Force said on Telegram that the app had probably been subjected to hostile interference, and stated plainly that there was no radiation threat. Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications urged users to disregard strange messages appearing in the application. A Stanford cyber-policy scholar, Herbert Lin, told the BBC's Newsday programme he believed it was the first time an official Ukrainian information application had experienced such an incident.
Hours later came the mirror report. Early Monday, Russia's emergencies ministry said its emergency-warnings app, which alerts Russians to drone attacks, had suffered what it called a massive cyberattack that let attackers send false information to the public. The ministry named no culprit and said its broader public warning system was operating normally and had not been affected. Neither government had publicly established who was responsible for both incidents, and there was no confirmation that the two attacks were connected, according to the reporting read by this desk.
The timing is the other half of the story. The false alerts appeared minutes before a localized ceasefire in the front-line Kherson region ended at about 11 p.m. Sunday. The truce, in force since Tuesday, had allowed civilians to leave the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky while fighting continued elsewhere, and Ukraine reported evacuating 167 people from threatened areas in the region on Sunday. Russian strikes also cut power to thousands of people in Ukraine overnight, the BBC reported.
