Hackers spent several hours on September 17 sending waves of malicious requests to the website of FREEДОМ, a state-run channel operated by the Multimedia Platform of Foreign Broadcasting of Ukraine. The broadcaster described the incident as a combined attack.
The requests arrived in waves throughout the day, and pages in some sections took noticeably longer to load. For ten minutes the site was completely unavailable to users worldwide.
The malicious traffic came from addresses that resolved to the United States. Even so, the state broadcaster believes Russian hackers were behind the attack.
The content management system slowed down as well. As a result, the news feed and other materials went live with delays. The broadcaster says its technical team dealt with the problem quickly.
Follow Mediasat on Google News: the latest in TV, telecom and tech
The rest of Ukraine’s foreign broadcasting network stayed online. The websites of the Dim TV channel and the digital outlet The Gaze worked normally, as did the web versions of the FREEДОМ and UATV mobile apps.
FREEДОМ’s website has been attacked repeatedly before. Hackers have also interfered with satellite broadcasts of Dim and FREEДОМ and used other types of cyberattacks. On April 24, Russian hackers targeted FREEДОМ’s internal communications system.
