RuTube, a Russian video streaming service, has denied losing all of its source code following a cyber-attack last week that coincided with Russia’s ‘Victory Day.’ Owned by Gazprom-Media and billed as a “Russian equivalent to YouTube,” it boasts 25 million monthly active users but has been inaccessible since Monday evening.
“As you know, APTs are planned and – importantly – costly attacks,” RuTube says in a set of translated Telegram posts. “Someone really wanted to prevent RuTube from showing the victory parade and fireworks. It is not a sin to remember which battles ours won.”
The video platform claims it has been attempting to restore access with the aid of security firm Positive Technologies and has “localized” the situation. Members of Anonymous say the attack was significantly more severe, as the Anonymous TV account tweeted: “Nearly 75% of the databases and infrastructure of the main version and 90% of the backup and cluster to restore the databases have been severely affected, that means #RuTube is probably GONE FOREVER.”
RuTube, on the other hand, has vehemently denied the loss of its source code and data. It’s vital to realize that video hosting involves hundreds of computers and petabytes of archive material. The recovery would take longer than the engineers had anticipated.
However, the dire predictions have nothing to do with the current situation: the source code is public, and the library is intact. The work of restoring parts of the file system of remote environments and databases on some servers is now ongoing. Meanwhile, Russian television schedules were hacked on Monday, with the names of every show modified to contain anti-war themes.
