Video hosting Rutube was hacked on the night of May 9th. The company believes that the cyber attack was planned for this very day in order to disrupt the broadcast of the victory parade in Rutube. On the same day, screenshots from the internal system of the service with a list of user channels appeared on Twitter. The hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the hack.

Screenshots of the administrative panel of the service were published in an account whose authors describe their activities as follows: “IT working for peace in Ukraine” (“IT working for peace in Ukraine”).

They also published a letter allegedly sent by Rutube director Alexei Nazarov to the FSB with a complaint about possible fraud in the purchase of an information security system from a subsidiary of the Russian Group IB. “All this money was wasted,” the authors of the Twitter account comment on this document.

One of the published screenshots also shows that TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov registered his channel for mail on Gmail (Google’s mail service).

Earlier in this account, the user base of another Russian service, Rossgram, was already published. Its creators position the social network as an analogue of Instagram. The app has yet to be created, but more than half a million people have signed up to be the first to download the app, Rossgram’s co-founder told the BBC. Their data just ended up in one of the merged databases.

“In our opinion, this is a great start [of the project] in terms of user security,” the authors of the Twitter account added.

The press service of Rutube BBC assured that the user base is not compromised, and the data is not affected. “At the moment, we can say that the target of the attack was the infrastructure of the service,” the company said.

After the release of the BBC material, the hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack and hacking of Rutube.

On the morning of Victory Day, Rutube’s press service announced that the video hosting had been subjected to the largest cyberattack in the history of the company. The company added that “the operational response team is already working to restore access to the video service.” But in two days, the operational response team failed to fix the site.

By noon on the holiday, Rutube reported that the entire library, including user-generated content, was unaffected. But the site still did not open.

“Someone tried with all his might to prevent us from broadcasting the main event of today – the Victory Parade. We will be happy to show it on record and do everything to win again,” such a post appeared on the telegram channel of the service on the evening of May 9.

Following in Telegram, there was an correspondence skirmish between Rutube and the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mikhail Fedorov. In his channel, Fedorov wrote in Russian that what happened was not a cyber attack, but “a special operation to improve the Russian IT infrastructure.” Rutube responded in Ukrainian, saying that “this attack has become another reason to rally and support our own.”

The next day, The Village reported, citing a source close to the Rutube team, that the video hosting was “unrecoverable.”

The press service of Rutube called such forecasts gloomy and hastened to refute them. “The cyberattack affected more than 90% of the backups, and the recovery of the affected objects will take longer than originally planned,” the company said .

In Russia, they began to actively promote Rutube when the authorities increased the number of claims against Google, which owns YouTube.

In recent years, a Russian court has fined Google billions of rubles, and YouTube has blocked several Russian media accounts because of the war.

From the beginning of the year, Rutube literally began to drive the audience. State institutions were transferred to the platform, moderation was simplified for near-state companies, and top bloggers were attracted in various ways.

But even such measures do not help Rutube catch up with YouTube in terms of the number of Russian viewers. Now the Mediascope company, which deals with media measurements, does not publish statistics on Rutube, the press service told the BBC. In September last year, Rutube’s daily audience in Russia was about 151,000 people over 12 years old, while YouTube’s figure reached 32.9 million, RBC wrote.