On October 7, 2024, hackers attacked the networks of VGTRK, a major player in Russian state television and the main domestic vehicle of Kremlin propaganda. The date was not chosen at random, as Russian President Vladimir Putin was celebrating his 72nd birthday. The cyber-hacktivists disrupted the online broadcast (and thus the international feed) of VGTRK’s 80 television and radio channels for much of the day.

VGTRK includes the highly popular Russia-1 and Russia-24 channels, the former being a general-interest TV station and the latter focusing on continuous news coverage. However, traditional broadcasting on television and radio stations within Russia was not affected. The situation returned to normal on October 8, 2024.

On the same day, hacktivists also aired a deepfake of Vladimir Putin on Krym24 TV, a Russian television channel in Crimea. In the fake video, the Russian president appears to claim that his country cannot defeat the Ukrainian army and urges the local population “not to resist Ukrainian soldiers.”

Sudo rm -RF, a pro-Ukrainian hacktivist collective, claimed responsibility for the hack on X (formerly Twitter). The group posted the message “Happy birthday, dickhead,” along with screenshots showing the disruption of VGTRK’s broadcast. Russian state media outlet Gazeta.ru confirmed the attribution of the attack to Sudo rm -RF.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov acknowledged that this cyber-offensive was “unprecedented.” As a cornerstone of Moscow’s propaganda machine, VGTRK is part of Russia’s critical state infrastructure. By hacking it, the Ukrainian hacktivists demonstrated their ability to “probably target any other Russian entity,” according to Joanna Szostek, a Russian media expert at the University of Glasgow, interviewed by France 24.

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