Russian public media holding Rossiya Segodnya withstood a major cyberattack on Thursday. The operation targeted resources including RIA Novosti and Sputnik International, leveraging around 1 million bots through IP addresses in Asia and Latin America.
It began at 11am Moscow time and, at its peak, cybersecurity experts blocked 720,000 IP addresses.
The agency is a key player in Russia’s media landscape, disseminating news to both domestic and international audiences. Rossiya Segodnya is a successor to Soviet-era news agencies and has expanded its digital reach through Sputnik, which broadcasts in multiple languages globally.
The attack follows a similar cyber offensive earlier this week against VGTRK, a Russian public broadcaster, which disrupted its operations. VGTRK, like Rossiya Segodnya, is a significant part of the Russian media ecosystem, running news channels like Rossiya 1 and Rossiya 24.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become more frequent since the conflict with Ukraine began in 2022. Ukrainian hacker groups have been linked to several high-profile cyberattacks targeting Russian media, government websites, and critical infrastructure.
In 2022, Rossiya Segodnya also faced a major DDoS attack during the early stages of the fighting, according to RIA Novosti. Such attacks, designed to overwhelm servers by flooding them with requests, have been part of the ongoing cyber warfare between Russia and Ukraine. Both sides have accused each other of using cyberattacks as part of their broader military strategies.