After three days of inactivity following a cyber attack, RuTube, the Russian YouTube, has finally come back online. Almost all of its contents would have been preserved in the end, but the site is not yet fully functional.
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict began in cyberspace, and while fighting has sadly drifted to physical terrain, online attacks have not slowed down. Latest victim, the Russian YouTube, RuTube, has just recovered from a violent cyberattack after three days of silence. The video hosting site with three million monthly users was taken offline on May 9, hours before the broadcast of the parade in Moscow celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
In a Telegram post dated May 10, the platform explained that it was the victim of “biggest cyberattack” of its history. It anticipated a longer than usual restoration of access, and rightly so. In the wake of this attack, several Russian media had also been hacked and displayed the following message: “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their children is on your hands. Television and the authorities lie. No to war.“
This morning the online Russian TV schedule page was hacked
The name of every program was changed to “On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war” pic.twitter.com/P2uCNz8cqa
—Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) May 9, 2022
The hosted content finally saved
Putting RuTube back online on the evening of May 11 required the intervention of a team of cybersecurity experts, according to Reuters. For the duration of the attack, the site’s homepage displayed a temporary message stating that it was doing “the subject of technical work“following an attack.”For now, the situation is under control. User data has been saved“, could we read.
The question of data, and in particular the petabytes of videos hosted on the platform, has been one of the main points of tension in recent days. Several sources claimed that many of them had been deleted without the possibility of restoration, which RuTube quickly denied afterwards. Coming out of this technical crisis, the Russian network said that 99.5% of the catalog was again available to users, but that the search and comment functions still needed to be patched up.
They deny ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/ztHYmwHAJR
— Valéry Rieß-Marchive (@ValeryMarchive) May 10, 2022