The news website Novyny Donbasu was targeted in an intense cyber-attack by Russian hackers, resulting in the website temporarily going down, chief editor Yulia Didenko reported to Yulia Harkusha, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Donetsk oblast.
Didenko said that the hackers accessed and administrator’s account and through it the contributor database and the news archive. The website has been partially restored, but the team was only able to recover archive material from 25 February 2025 and later.
CERT-UA (Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine), the cyberdefense team of the State Special Communications Department in Donetsk oblast, and the Security Service of Ukraine are helping to restore the website.
The hacker group “Cyber Sickle” has claimed responsibility for the cyber-attack, claiming that the website had been destroyed. The hackers called Novyny Donbasu a “psychological warfare tool” and said that they had “dealt a blow to an anti-Russian disinformation mouthpiece that has been poisoning the information space for many years.”
“We have penetrated the protected perimeters and downloaded the site’s full database, including archives, contributor lists, and technical information. This is our trophy and proof of their crimes. Liquidation. After analyzing and downloading the data, the servers and the database were destroyed irretrievably. The website will never reopen. Broadcast stopped. This resource has been sowing hatred for years, weaponising its content. We have stopped this information dumpster once and for all,” the cybercriminals’ statement reads.
The hackers posted a message on the website stating that it had been liquidated: “The website Novyny Donbasu has been liquidated. Your ‘news’ is a weapon of lies that misinforms the healthy population of Russia and Ukraine. The entire database has been destroyed. The information dumpster has ceased to exist.”
The Russian hackers also threaten to continue to destroy “any website, any structure that works to disinform and divide.”
Yulia Didenko said that this is not the first cyberattack the website has sustained.
“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian sites were being hacked through banner advertising, we were also affected: they posted a huge banner of the St. George ribbon on the main page. This is a very serious problem, but also a sign that we, as an independent media outler, pose a real threat to Russia, because we have been continuously working for our audience under occupation since 2014,” she added.
Novyny Donbasu has been operating since 2003, and covering war and occupation-related news since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014. The website now reports news not only from Donetsk oblast, but also from the regions that border Russia or are in the combat zone.
Russia committed 896 crimes against journalists and the media in Ukraine in the four years of the full-scale invasion. Of these, 110 were cybercrimes.