Fake nuclear alerts: first Ukraine's air raid app, then Russia's
Late on Sunday, 1 November 2026, phones across Ukraine warned of a radiation threat, a chemical attack and street fighting in Kyiv. None of it was real. Hackers had taken over Air Alert, the official app Ukrainians use to know when to head for shelter.
A few hours later, Russians across the country woke up to warnings of a nuclear strike from their own Emergencies Ministry.
What happened in Ukraine
Air Alert is developed with Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry and the security company Ajax Systems. At around 11 p.m. its map turned red across the country, and users started getting alerts about nuclear, chemical and radiation threats. One message, in Russian, read: "Hi! A nuclear alert is about to go off all across Ukraine! Don't worry, the Oreshnik is on its way," the Kyiv Independent reports. Some alerts carried links, and regional governors told people not to click them.
The Air Force reacted on Telegram: "It is likely that the 'Air Alert' app has been compromised by the enemy." It added that there was no radiation threat. The Digital Transformation Ministry said street sirens and the other warning systems were working normally, and asked people to turn on their phones' built-in emergency alerts. Kyiv's own city app kept working.
The false alerts were cleared within about an hour, and the State Emergency Service said the warning system was back to normal by midnight. By 2 a.m. the app was gradually coming back, without the display of incoming targets for now. Its team said the app does not store personal data, so users' data was not at risk.
Who did it
Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications blamed Russia, Al Jazeera reports. A group calling itself Hitcore, unknown until now, claimed the attack through a Russian Telegram channel. Its story: one of the system's administrators opened a phishing file on his work computer, a file he thought was photos from a girl he was chatting with. From there, the group says, it added the fake alerts. None of this has been independently confirmed.
Ukrainian hackers strike back
At around 2 a.m. on 2 November, Russia's Emergencies Ministry said its mobile app had suffered a "massive cyberattack" and that the attackers had managed to send false information to the public. The app is meant to warn Russians about incoming drones.
The same message went out through the ministry's federal app and its regional channels in the MAX messenger. It announced nuclear warheads launched at every region of Russia on "P1-SUN carriers", the name of a Ukrainian interceptor drone, and told people to stock up on food for three weeks and shelter in basements, 24 Kanal reports.
This was no local glitch: people got the alert in almost every region of Russia, from Moscow and St Petersburg to Bashkortostan and Tyumen. The partisan movement ATESH, which says pro-Ukrainian hackers were behind the attack, claims that all of the ministry's regional channels in MAX were taken over. The ministry did not say who did it, and insists its wider warning system kept working normally.
What it shows
If Hitcore's story is true, a national warning system was taken over because one person opened one file. For an hour the app showed whatever the attackers wanted, and nothing inside it could tell you what was real. People found out from outside the app, from the Air Force's own channels saying there was no radiation threat.
Data works the same way. Once someone has taken over a system, you can't trust what it shows you, and you can't check it against itself. You need a copy kept outside it, made before the attack. That's what a backup is for.
Facts checked on 2 November 2026.