Moscow has long sought to improve its domestic internet
infrastructure, even disconnecting itself from the global internet during tests
last summer, but the need to strengthen its technology solutions has become
more pressing since the West started imposing unprecedented sanctions against
Russia over the conflict in Ukraine.
RuTube's customary homepage, packed with video content,
reappeared on Wednesday evening, having been inaccessible since early on Monday
morning, the day Russia celebrated the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany
in World War Two.
During the outage, a short message on the site read:
"Attention! The site is undergoing technical work. The site was attacked.
At the moment the situation is under control. User data has been saved."
RuTube said on Wednesday it had brought in several different
experts to investigate the attack and repair the damage, including a team from
Russian cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies' Expert Security Centre, which
it said had been working on the issues for two days.
Vedomosti newspaper cited a Positive Technologies director,
Alexei Novikov, as saying that RuTube had been subjected to a targeted attack
aimed at disabling the service and that it may take as many as three weeks to
investigate and respond to the incident given the scale of the attack.
"We've got to grips with the basic toolkit the hackers
are using," Denis Goidenko, head of Positive Technologies' information
security threat response department, said in a video message on Telegram
earlier on Wednesday.
"There's a lot of work to do because RuTube's
infrastructure is quite large and complex."
RuTube said 99.5 percent of the video library was available
for users to view, but the search and comment functions still needed restoring.
The episode highlights how reliant Russia remains on
YouTube, which has around 90 million monthly users in the country, and offers
clues as to why Moscow has not yet blocked the US service, a fate that has
befallen other foreign social media platforms.
Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the State Duma parliamentary
committee on information policy, stressed the importance of RuTube being able
to withstand future hacking efforts.
"I think the company will draw conclusions from this
story and seriously reconsider the approach to protecting its
infrastructure," Gorelkin wrote on Telegram. "We need our own strong
national video-hosting site." © Reuters
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