For millions of Ukrainians who have integrated regular notifications from the state-endorsed Air Alert app into their daily wartime routines, a wave of unauthorised, menacing alerts sent out on a Sunday evening triggered widespread confusion and temporary panic across multiple regions.
The Ukrainian Air Force confirmed in an official Telegram statement that the widely used public safety application, which is backed by the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation to deliver real-time updates on the start and end of national defence warnings, had fallen victim to hostile cyber interference. The unauthorised alerts began circulating at 22:47 local time (20:47 GMT), starting with a Ukrainian-language notification falsely declaring a radiation threat active in the capital city of Kyiv. A follow-up alert sent one minute later, written in Russian, teased an imminent nationwide nuclear alert and made a flippant reference to the Oreshnik missile system. Two more successive false alerts were dispatched by the compromised app in the following 60 seconds: one warning of an imminent chemical weapons attack on Kyiv that urged residents to avoid stepping outside, and a fourth claiming active street fighting was unfolding in the city centre that repeated the stay-indoors instruction.
The compromised system then sent out a staggered sequence of separate all-clear notifications, each corresponding to one of the four fabricated threat warnings, deepening public disorientation in the immediate aftermath. Ukraine’s Central Intelligence Agency also confirmed the breach, noting that the false radiation alert broadcast via the hacked app even triggered public loudspeaker warning systems across the Lviv region, despite no actual radiological hazard existing anywhere in the country. Separately, Vinnytsia Oblast Governor Natalya Zabolotna verified the incident as a deliberate cyberattack, issuing an urgent public advisory warning residents not to click any embedded links that appeared in the unvetted, hacked alert messages.
Ukrainian authorities have since urged the public to cross-reference all national security updates through verified official Telegram channels, local civil defence sirens, and trusted government sources, rather than relying solely on the Air Alert app until full security patches are deployed to prevent further hostile intrusions.
Ukraine air raid app apparently hacked as users receive false radiation threat, Air Force says
