On 18 March 2026, online media outlet Donbas News (‘Novyny Donbasu’) reported that it had been the target of a major cyber attack by Russian hackers, which resulted in access being blocked to their website.
According to Yulia Didenko, the outlet’s editor-in-chief, attackers hacked an administrator account and gained access to the outlet’s author database and news archive. The website has since partially resumed operations, although they were only able to restore archives dating back to 25 February 2026. Restoration efforts were supported by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the cyber defense sector of the State Special Communications Department in Donetsk region, and the Security Service of Ukraine.
Pro-Russian hacker group ‘Cyber Serp’ (Cyber Sickle) claimed responsibility for the attack. The group stated that it had penetrated the site’s systems and downloaded its full database, including archives, author lists, and technical information. It described the data as a “trophy” and said that after analysis, the servers and database were irreversibly destroyed. Hackers claimed that the website would never reopen and described the outlet as an “instrument of psychological warfare” and a source of “anti-Russian disinformation”.
Didenko reported that this was not the first cyber attack that Novyny Donbasu had faced. She said that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the website had also been hacked, including an incident in which its homepage was defaced with a large St. George ribbon image, a Russian military symbol.
On March 27, Lyubov Rakovytsia, the head of DII Ukraine – a media support organization that Donbas News is part of – reported that the media outlet’s technical teams had still not been able to bring their website back online.