Ukraine's Emergency Alerts Become a Cyberwar Front

Millions of Ukrainians received an alert from a government app on Sunday night warning of an imminent radiation and chemical threat and fighting on Kyiv’s streets. In a Telegram follow-up, officials said the Air Alarm application had probably faced “hostile interference”: “There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel.” The emergency channel delivered the warning first. The correction came later.

Trust in the Official Channel

Russia soon told its citizens that Ukraine had hacked Russian systems to warn of imminent nuclear strikes. Neither country claimed responsibility, and no one knew where or how the incidents began. Officials and analysts widely read them as tit-for-tat attacks initiated by Russia. A hacker in Ukraine’s “hacktivist” community told the BBC that Ukraine likely carried out the breach of the Russian alert system as a “retaliatory attack.”

Responsibility remains uncertain. That matters when government communication systems become part of the conflict: an alert can cause immediate fear, while a correction has to compete with the first message. Adam Pilton, cyber security adviser at Heimdal, said air-raid alerts can trigger panic and urgency. “A message from your air raid alert system generates emotion straight away, almost like a phishing email, with that sense of panic and urgency, and you respond and react,” he said.

Pilton said the attack struck “the point where people trust their government.” He compared it with a cyberattack on ASOS a few weeks earlier and said disruptions to official communication platforms leave civilians facing uncertainty and confusion. “If you can't trust communications that purportedly come from official platforms, whether a business or your government, then what can you trust? That's exactly the purpose of this attack, to erode trust,” he said.

The Scale of the Cyber Front

Ukraine's security service said its cybersecurity department had neutralised more than 16,000 Russian cyberattacks and “critical cyber incidents” between the start of the war in February 2022 and July this year. Brigadier general Volodymyr Karasteliov described a DDoS attack on a nationwide Ukrainian television channel that lasted three hours.

“The botnet generated up to 200,000 requests per minute from nodes in Asia, Europe, and the United States,” he said. Hackers targeted the website's application layer, imitating real users and sending complex requests to overload the server and make the site unavailable. The figures show a conflict fought through networks, as well as through the official channels civilians depend on for information.

A study published in PLOS in April 2024 ranked Russia as the world’s number one hotspot for cybercriminals, followed by Ukraine. Cybersecurity firm CybelAngel said attacks between the countries are largely asymmetric. Its REACT team recorded 1,651 cyber incidents targeting Ukrainian entities and 575 targeting Russian entities between January 2025 and January 2026. “The asymmetry isn't new, since the prior twelve months looked nearly identical in shape and scale,” the company said.

Prepared for Uncertainty

Pilton said Russia had claimed the system was a communication platform rather than an actual air-raid system, but added: “Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. What matters is that people look to their leaders to understand what's happening.” People tend to follow official communications, he said, unlike media reports, which they may treat with skepticism and investigate further.

Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament's foreign affairs committee and a member of Volodymyr Zelensky's Servant of the People party, told the BBC that Ukraine and its people were prepared for all scenarios. “It's a very unpleasant fact but it is part of cyber war and people in Ukraine understand that. It is possible and we are quite prepared for such possibilities,” he said. The alerts, rival claims and uncertainty over responsibility leave civilians navigating a conflict where even messages meant to guide them can become targets.