As of: March 12, 2024, 4:48 p.m
By: Alexandra Heidsiek
Comments
Press
Split
After Navalny's death, Russia is stepping up the fight against independent reporting - and may be preparing for an isolated internet.
Riga – The website cannot be reached:
Medusa
readers will have to get used to this message.
The independent Russian exile media reports on intensive cyber attacks in the weeks before the presidential election in Russia.
The attacks, which have been common since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, have increased even more since the death of opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
Putin is increasingly relying on cyber attacks in the war against independent media © Screenshot Medusa website
Cyber attacks are a popular strategy for Putin
The current campaign attacks on all fronts:
Medusa
names
Attempts to hack journalists' accounts, block crowdfunding channels and overload the website.
Telegram and the newsletter service provider Mailchimp were also attacked in order to make it more difficult for
Medusa
to distribute his messages.
It's not just independent media that are affected by the Kremlin's cyber attacks.
At the beginning of 2023, the Vulkan files became public, which revealed the cyber strategy of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It named control systems for railway transport and critical infrastructure of energy companies as possible targets for Russian hacker attacks.
The EU, the Bundestag, Microsoft and French ministries have also already become victims of Putin's specialists.
The ARD documentary “Putin’s Bears – The Most Dangerous Hackers in the World” recently made clear how threatening these are.
Russia's Internet may soon be shielded from the rest of the world
In addition, Moscow has increasingly blocked websites since the attack on Ukraine.
The Facebook parent company
Meta
is banned, and the career network
has also been on the red list for a long time.
For two years now , independent media such as
Medusa
or
Novaya Gazeta
have only been available in Russia via VPN.
Experts see this as an attempt to gradually shield the Internet from the rest of the world à la China and North Korea.
Massive outages on the Russian Internet at the end of January also indicate such a plan.
These are presumably linked to the expansion of a sovereign network, called “Cheburnet” (a portmanteau consisting of the popular cartoon character
Cheburashka
and the word Internet).
Medusa
also expects widespread Internet outages
for the Russian election from March 15th to 17th - and the possible launch of the Cheburnet.
(uh)