Cyberattack knocks out Russian video platform Rutube

Russia’s Rutube video platform remained offline for a second day on Tuesday, after a massive cyberattack knocked it out just hours before it was to stream the Victory Day parade in Moscow.

“We have, in fact, been hit with the biggest cyberattack in Rutube’s history,” the platform said in a message on Telegram on Tuesday.

“Restoring (access) will take more time than engineers first thought,” it said, while its website rutube.ru displayed a message saying it was working on restoring access following the hack.

The site went offline on Monday morning, ahead of the annual Victory Day parade on the Red Square in Moscow that came more than two months after Russia launched what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

“Following sites of Russian institutions, which over the past two months have constantly come under cyberattacks, hackers have reached Rutube. The video hosting site has come under a massive cyberattack,” the company said in a Telegram message on Monday.

“Someone really wanted to prevent Rutube from showing the Victory Day parade and the holiday fireworks.”

Ukrainian media on Monday published photos that purported to show a hack of Russian television channels MTS, NTV-Plus, Rostelecom and Winx, which featured a message saying “the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their children is on your hands. Television and the authorities are lying. No to war”.

Also on Monday, a message denouncing Russia’s “bloody and absurd” military operation in Ukraine was briefly published on the site of the normally Kremlin-loyal news website lenta.ru.

Signed by two of its journalists, the text was quickly taken down.

“We are now looking for work, lawyers and maybe political asylum,” wrote the journalists, Egor Polyakov and Alexandra Miroshnikova.