MOSCOW: A hacking attack caused some Russian broadcasters to put out a false warning on Tuesday urging people to take shelter from an incoming missile attack, the emergencies ministry said.
“As a result of the hacking of servers of radio stations and TV channels, in some regions of the country information about the announcement of an air alert was broadcast,” the ministry said in a statement.
“This information is false and does not correspond to reality.”
Among the regions where the fake messages were broadcast was Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
On regional TV an image was shown with a symbol of a man running for cover from incoming missiles and a message reading “Everybody to the shelter, now”, according to images posted on social media.
Radio stations played a loud siren sound with a message stating: “Attention, attention. An air alert is being issued. Everybody head to shelters now. Attention, attention. Missile threat.”
Russian state media cited some local officials blaming Ukraine for the messages. There was no official comment from Kyiv.
Several radio stations put out similar warnings last week, and websites run by Russia’s state TV conglomerate went down during President Vladimir Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address to Russian lawmakers on Feb 21 in what state media said was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The Russian defence ministry said on Tuesday that Ukraine had launched attempted drone attacks against two southern Russian regions overnight.
The defence ministry said the attacks — in the southern Krasnodar and Adygea regions — had been suppressed and failed to inflict any damage.