In recent years, when a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeted a business or federal entity in Western countries, Russia, China, and North Korea were often the prime suspects. However, the situation has recently shifted. Today, around 2 PM Moscow time (approximately 10:50 GMT), both WhatsApp and Telegram experienced significant outages in Russia due to a DDoS attack.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulatory authority, confirmed the incident and reported that the disruption was resolved within an hour, preventing a major outage.
For context, WhatsApp is owned by Meta (formerly Facebook) and is based in the United States, while Telegram is a Russian company with alleged ties to the Kremlin.
Over the past 10 months, Russia has ramped up its internet surveillance and imposed strict censorship on media and online content.
In recent months, the Russian government has begun blocking online services that either extensively cover the conflict with Ukraine or support Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. This crackdown has included blocking access to Meta, which owns WhatsApp, and Instagram.
This may have prompted pro-Western hackers to target Telegram, which has become a popular platform for various groups, mostly including criminal elements.
But it’s still unclear why the downtime triggering attack was launched on the American entity owned by Mark Zuckerberg….?
As why will the Pro-west hackers launch an attack on their own country owned service.
Vox Pop on this incident is invited!
The other fact that needs clarification is how the country detected the attack, specifically on certain services and thwarted it within no time?
Or was this attack and downtime, just meant to garner media attention?
The post Telegram and WhatsApp suffer downtime in Russia due to DDoS appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.
August 21, 2024 at 08:39PM
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