Reuters reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation address on Tuesday experienced difficulties that may have been the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The suspected attack downed several websites broadcasting the speech, including the All-Russia State Television and Broadcasting Company website and the Smotrim live-streaming platform. The All-Russia State Television and Broadcasting Company website displayed a message during the speech stating that there was technical difficulties.
The RIA Novosti news agency reportedly claimed that malicious actors were to blame for the outages. It is possible that the IT Army, a hacktivist group founded at the start of the war against Ukraine, was responsible for the cyberattack. DDoS-for-hire tools are readily available on the internew, making campaigns such as the one targeting the address easy to wage.
Read More: Putin Speech Interrupted by DDoS Attack
