Hacked alert app sends false nuclear warnings to Ukrainians

A compromised alert app sent Ukrainians a series of false warnings on Sunday night, escalating from threats of attacks to nuclear strikes, chemical attacks and fighting in the streets. The messages unsettled some recipients, but many quickly questioned whether they were genuine.

Ukraine's Air Force said within 15 minutes that the app had been compromised and that there was no radiation threat. Messages giving the all clear, however, took more than an hour to arrive. Some of the false alerts were written in Russian, and one contained a link to a Telegram channel apparently belonging to a hacker group.

For Sofia Kochmar, a 34-year-old mother living in Lviv, the reference to a nuclear threat initially seemed frightening. She said she first thought something nuclear was heading toward Ukraine. Her doubts grew when another notification described street fighting in Kyiv, a claim she found implausible.

Anastasiia Romanytska, a 29-year-old ballerina in Kyiv, received the warnings from friends because she does not have the app installed. She initially wondered whether they were a joke, but said her heart began racing and her stomach tightened. Even with that physical response, she felt the warnings were not serious, or hoped that was the case.

Several apps provide air raid notifications and maps of threatened areas, drawing on the same information as the official government-backed app. Yevhen Baliutov, a cybersecurity expert at the Kyiv School of Economics, told the BBC he believed Russians were responsible for the hack. He said many Ukrainians followed a link in the alerts to a Russian Telegram channel, potentially leaving them exposed to disinformation, phishing or data breaches.

The informal wording of Sunday's messages suggested the involvement of hacktivist groups. Such groups may support Moscow or Kyiv without operating under either government's formal direction. Russia and Ukraine are both widely believed to conduct cyberattacks against each other. Baliutov said the two sides had comparable cyber warfare capabilities and that a Ukrainian response targeting Russia's emergency alert system would have been logical.

Kochmar said the initial concern soon gave way to humor. Colleagues exchanged messages in work chats, discussing the alerts and rapidly turning the episode into a joke. That reaction reflected the skepticism with which many people greeted the increasingly extreme claims.

Baliutov said the incident had a limited impact but exposed a weakness in a vital service. He argued that security needed to be built into such applications from the outset, particularly when millions depended on them. After four and a half years of war and attack warnings that sometimes sound hourly, authorities already faced difficulty keeping people alert. The hack adds to the challenge of convincing Ukrainians that protective warning systems are reliable and should be followed.