The great cyber attack on Russian state television
Since global media are completely silent on the subject, whereas I raised it in my 22 February essay analyzing Putin’s State of the Nation address, I am obliged to return briefly to this subject for purposes of closure.
Shortly before the live broadcast of Putin’s widely anticipated annual speech was about to begin at noon Moscow time on the 21st www.smotrim.ru, the website platform for all of Russia’s state television programs, both live and streaming, went dead. That is to say, the home page was on the screen but it was a frame without content. Then a few hours later even that disappeared, most likely by decision of Russia’s communication engineers to shut down and prepare for reconstruction of the site.
The Kremlin said not a word about this broadcasting disaster, which had to be the result of a cyber attack waged by a state, not a prankster group, given its intensity and success in disabling the site. This leads me to believe that the damage only affected the international broadcasting, meaning that Moscow had no need to make embarrassing explanations to its domestic audience.
Last night, one week after the disaster, www.smotrim.ru was back in operation, as if nothing had happened. However, the configuration for accessing the live programs is not the same as before, indicating that what was done was not merely flicking a switch but the reconstruction of the site from zero.
It is noteworthy that the problem was confined to the state news broadcasters www.smotrim.ru and www.vesti.ru Other Russian channels, even the far more aggressive Solovyov Live channel, continued operation this past week without any problems.
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Surely the Russians know who did it. One may be certain they will take their revenge at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner. Given the fragility of the global internet, it is stunning that this brazen attack took place at all. If I may invert the words in the soliloquy of Hermann, the ill-fated hero of Tchaikovsky’s opera Queen of Spades, spoken at the end of his calamitous wagers at cards, ‘today it is me, tomorrow it will be you.’
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023