The donation section of the #SHOTAM website was targeted by hackers shortly after the team discovered that a network of social media pages called Insider had been renamed to #SHOTAM, the media outlet reported in an Instagram post.
“We do not believe in coincidences and regard this as a retaliation for our public stance and an attempt to disrupt our work. It is revealing that the very section of the website that allows us to receive support through donations was targeted,” the team wrote.
The team added that they had recorded a mass surge in automated fake account creation (over 100 in just 12 hours), which had clear signs of bot activity, such as:
- the phone numbers being sequentially generated from the same operator pool;
- the accounts being inactive after creation;
- new accounts being created in regular wave-like surges instead of being naturally distributed over time.
The team said that they had repelled the attack, the website had not been damaged and was operating as usual.
“And we are working on boosting our protection right now, because we assume that this could have been a test run before a more intense attack. We are also recording all the details and collecting technical evidence,” #SHOTAM said.
The team added that they did not consider the use of their website name to be an oversight or a coincidental match in creative decisions. There had been such assumptions before, but after the attack on the website disproved them.
On 18 March 2026, the news website Novyny Donbasu was targeted in an intense cyber-attack by Russian hackers, resulting in the website temporarily going offline. The hackers accessed and administrator’s account and through it the contributor database and the news archive.
