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Ukraine and Russia are reporting that hackers broke into their emergency alert apps within hours of each other.
Getting into it: This all started after Ukrainians got red-level air raid alerts across the country around 10:47 p.m. Sunday, followed by messages warning of a radiation threat in Kyiv, a chemical attack and street fighting in the capital. One message, written in Russian, said a nuclear alert was coming for all of Ukraine and told people not to worry because it was Russia’s Oreshnik missile flying. All-clear messages went out about an hour later.
Ukraine’s air force said the app had likely been hacked and spokesman Yuriy Ignat confirmed it, while Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications blamed Russia. A separate alert app for Kyiv kept working normally. Early Monday, Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said hackers had used its app, which warns people about incoming drones, to spread false information. It didn’t say who was responsible, though a Ukrainian spy group claimed it pushed fake nuclear strike warnings to phones in Russia. Nobody has tied the two hacks together yet.
The Russian app wasn’t the only target. Rosstat, Russia’s statistics agency, said Sunday that hackers went after its websites in a planned, coordinated attack from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1, and two anti-Kremlin hacking groups, the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, claimed they walked away with 23 terabytes, some of it covering how many troops Russia has lost. Rosstat denied that any databases leaked, and the hackers’ claims couldn’t be verified. The same groups took credit for a cyberattack that disrupted Russian airline Aeroflot last year.
This all comes as the longest truce of the war, a ceasefire around the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson that ran from Oct. 27 to Nov. 1, ended Sunday, with Kyiv saying Russia refused to extend it and a Ukrainian officer warning the fighting could pick back up even harder.






