On 31 January 2025, multiple Ukrainian online news outlets reported that they had been targeted with various types of cyber attacks over the past four days. Among the affected outlets was Ukrainska Pravda, Ukraine’s most widely read independent online outlet, which said on January 28 that its YouTube channel had been hacked. The outlet said that it had lost control over what was published on the channel, which has close to 1.2 million subscribers. On January 29, Ukrainska Pravda said that it had restored access and regained control over its YouTube channel.
Separately, on January 29, local news outlet Pershiy Krivorizkiy (which is based in the city of Kriviy Rih) said that its editorial team had received an email with information on a bomb which had allegedly been planted at the media outlet’s office. Journalists were evacuated while police inspected the premises, finding no explosives. Sofia Skyba, the executive director of Pershiy Krivorizkiy, told Ukraine’s Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a media freedom monitoring group, that she believed Russians were “most likely” behind the false bomb claim. Anonymous senders again sent bomb threats to the outlet on January 30 and 31.
On January 31, IMI received a similar threat with claims that a bomb would be detonated at the media organisation’s office in Kyiv. This threat was also sent by email.
In another incident, on January 30, online outlet Ukrainer was targeted in a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, due to which the outlet’s website went offline. It was unclear how fast Ukrainer’s teams managed to restore access to the website. The project’s founder Bohdan Lovhynenko earlier told IMI that he could not exclude that Russians were responsible attacks against the outlet. In a later comment provided to IMI, Lovhynenko said that the DDoS attack against Ukrainer had a “destructive character”, and that the website’s server had sustained “serious damage”.