Hackers send fake nuclear alerts through Ukraine and Russia warning apps
Ukraine's air raid alert app sent fake warnings of radiation, chemical attacks and street fighting on Sunday night, and hours later Russia said its own emergency warning app had been hit by a "massive cyberattack." Neither government has said who was behind the attacks, or whether the two are linked.
AI-assisted · US Brief desk · Sources listed below
What happened
Ukraine's widely used Air Alarm app sent red-level air raid warnings across the country on Sunday night, along with fake warnings of radiation, chemical attacks and street fighting to some users in areas including Kyiv, the BBC reported. One false message said Russia had launched its hypersonic Oreshnik missile, Al Jazeera reported. The messages were written in Russian, which tipped off many users that they were not real.
Why it matters
People on both sides rely on these apps to decide when to take shelter from missiles and drones. A fake alert can cause panic, and repeated false alarms can make people slower to respond to real ones. "I think it's the first time it's happened to an official Ukrainian information app, but I suspect it won't be the last," Herbert Lin, a cyber policy researcher at Stanford University, told the BBC.
More context
Ukraine's response: "The Air Alarm application has probably been subjected to hostile interference. There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel," Ukraine's air force said on Telegram, according to the BBC's translation. The government temporarily switched the app off, saying it had "apparently been compromised." A separate alert app for Kyiv kept working normally, city authorities said.
Then Russia: A few hours later, Russia's Emergencies Ministry said its own warning app had been hit by "a massive cyberattack" that sent "false information" to the public. A purported screenshot shared on Telegram by Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan group operating in Russian-held territory, showed a profanity-laced alert claiming that "nuclear warheads mounted on P1-Suns," a Ukrainian attack drone, had been launched at all regions of Russia and telling people to stock up on food for three weeks and hide. The BBC said there was no sign Monday morning of widespread panic in Russia.
What each side says: SPRAVDI, Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications, blamed Russia for the Ukrainian hack in a post on X, Al Jazeera reported. Russia's Emergencies Ministry did not say who it thought was responsible. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not address the breach directly but said Russian government websites are "under constant cyberattacks" and that AI tools are adding to the number of attacks. Oleksander Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament's foreign affairs committee, told the BBC the fake alert caused no panic. "It's a very unpleasant fact but it is part of cyber war and people in Ukraine understand that," he said.
The timing: The Ukrainian alerts went out minutes before a local ceasefire in the front-line Kherson region ended, the BBC reported. The truce, which began last Tuesday and was brokered in part by U.S. first lady Melania Trump to let civilians leave the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, was the longest of the war so far, according to Al Jazeera.
What's still unknown: Who carried out either attack, whether the two were coordinated, how the attackers got into the apps' alert systems, and when Ukraine's app will be fully back in service. Neither government had released technical details by Monday morning.
2 listed sources
References listed by US Brief; a source count is not a verification score.
Editorial sourcing notes
Neither government has offered public evidence of who carried out the attacks. A claim of responsibility by an outside group reported elsewhere could not be independently confirmed and is not included. The hero is a January 2026 file photo of a Kyiv metro station during an air alert; it is not from Sunday night.
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