More anti-Russia articles in UK media

British tabloids continue to exploit the Western media’s Russophobic agenda, inventing ever new implausible stories in order to get more attention. The day before the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest final in Turin, Italy, on May 14, The Sun and The Daily Mail decided to run a “remake” of the long-hackneyed story about the great and terrible Russian hackers.

The Sun, citing Italian sources, announced an alleged broad-scale cyberattack on the official Eurovision website and its online voting platform launched by Killnet, a Russian programming community. The British journalists provided “irrefutable” evidence, citing a post from the group’s Telegram channel on the evening of May 11, which said viewers were unable to vote online and “perhaps our DDOS attack is to blame for everything.” The writers claimed the hackers’ goal was to sabotage the Ukrainian contestants, Kalush Orchestra.

This news was instantly picked up and replicated by other Western media outlets. It is noteworthy that even The Sun's direct competitor in the UK tabloid segment, the Daily Mail, echoed the planted story, also providing a link to its biggest rival in the fight for the audience.

One also has to note The Sun’s admirable constancy in planting fake stories about Killnet’s “atrocities,” thereby creating another Russophobic myth – from relatively harmless attacks on the Romanian government’s websites to blood-chilling threats to remotely turning off ventilators in hospitals around the United Kingdom. All of them later turned out to be bogus because there was no confirmation.

Apparently, the journalists cited May 11 as the date of the planned attack on the Eurovision platforms for a reason. That date was free from any actual contest-related events (the semi-finals took place on May 10 and 12, and their multi-million audience never noticed any disruptions in the online platforms’ operation on those days), so they decided to give the audience a beautiful legend about an “invisible confrontation” between the “hackers” and security services, so as not to bother with any evidence.

To give their “theory” at least some credibility, the reporters apparently decided to link the attempt to disrupt Eurovision with cyber incidents allegedly occurring on several Italian government agencies’ websites on the same day.

We regret that the Western media are reluctant to be as thorough in covering the real DDOS attacks, on an unprecedented scale, that Russian government institutions and critical infrastructure have been subjected to on a daily basis for more than 2.5 months.

Original articles:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/18551214/russian-cyber-hack-eurovision-ukraine/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10811785/Russian-hackers-target-EUROVISION-Fears-grow-threat-sabotage-Ukraines-entry.html