The news website ZHAR.INFO was targeted in a continuous DDoS attack on 4–6 January following several social media posts by the media outlet reporting on high-profile construction projects in Khmelnytskyi city (including a downtown recreation area), which could potentially harm the interests of local officials and developers, ZHAR.INFO founder and editor Maria Turchyna reports to Alyona Bereza, the regional Institute of Mass Information representative.
The DDoS attack aimed to access the website’s admin panel.
“The year began with attempts to hack our website. It lasted three days. At first, it looked like a regular search engine parsing. But a detailed analysis of logins showed clearly that 88% of requests were trying to access the site’s admin panel,” says Maria Turchyna.
She added that someone had spent three days purposefully trying to hack the password to the website’s admin panel. The team believes the attack has to do with their reporting.
“Recently, we released several investigations exposing the Khmelnytskyi City Council for essentially assisting ‘friendly’ developers. These stories triggered lively discussions on social media. Well, it seems that the claim that ‘no one reads you,’ which we have heard so insistently repeated at us as we tried to get comments in the Khmelnytskyi City Council recently, is not true,” added Maria Turchyna.
The attack was confirmed by the IT specialists assisting the news outlet and by the Digital Security Lab (Tsyfrolaba). Tsyfrolaba specialists also shared a list of recommendations for news outlets to further secure their sites.
Earlier, on 2 December 2025, the website of the online news outlet Nashi Groshi sustained a DDoS attack shortly after the release of an investigation that could harm the interests of the Heart Institute director Borys Todurov.