Hackers hit a televised phone-in between President Putin and citizens at a TV show

A massive cyber attack attempted to disrupt a televised phone-in between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Rossiya 24 network.

Hackers launched a massive cyberattack against the state-broadcast Rossiya 24 network while transmitting a show in which President Putin was answering in real-time to answer from his citizens.

The televised phone-in with the Russian President lasted nearly four hours, but the massive DDoS attacks caused repeatedly connection issues, especially during calls from remote regions.

“Our digital systems are right now facing attacks, powerful DDoS attacks,” a Rossiya-24 presenter told Putin, after the broadcaster faced connection problems during a call by a citizen from the Kuzbass region in Siberia experienced connection issues.

President Putin was surprised by hearing that someone was launching a cyber attack against the TV show.

“Are you joking? Seriously?” Putin told the presenter. “Turns out we have hackers in Kuzbass,” .

The massive cyberattacks were confirmed by Rostelecom, major Russia’s telecommunications provider. Rostelecom added it adopting additional countermeasures to block such kinds of attacks.

At the time of this writing it is unclear who launched the cyber attacks.

“Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the RIA Novosti news agency that the origin of the attacks was unclear.” reads a press release published by AFP.

Cybersecurity was one of the main topics on the agenda at the summit between President Putin and President Joe Biden that took place in June.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Putin)

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