Hackers uploaded fake news on Czech news outlet entity CTK

An unknown attacker breached a Czech news outlet’s website owned by Czech News Agency (CTK) and posted a false article alleging an assassination attempt on Slovakia’s newly elected president, Peter Pellegrini, on Tuesday.

The Czech News Agency (CTK), owned by the government, confirmed that the attacker directly uploaded the fake story to its website, bypassing client distribution. CTK retracted the article, labelling it as false, and notified national intelligence and cybersecurity authorities about the security breach.

The bogus headline suggested Slovakia’s Security Information Service (BIS) thwarted an assassination plot against President Peter Pelligrini.

 

Avid CTK readers pointed out misspellings in Peter Pellegrini’s name.

 

Pellegrini’s recent election was seen as a win for Slovakia’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Robert Fico. Despite Slovakia’s NATO membership, Pellegrini expressed opposition to deploying armed forces to aid a member state under Russian attack.

The inaccurate article, published in Czech and English, implicated Ukrainian individuals in the false assassination attempt on Pellegrini, naming Vitaliy Usatyy, Kyiv’s charge d’affaires in Prague, as a perpetrator.

CTK classified the incident as disinformation. No evidence linking the hack to a specific entity has been released, and CTK stated it would not disclose further details.

Founded in 1918 following Czechoslovakia’s independence, CTK has operated independently since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 after the collapse of the Communist Party.

On the other hand, separate research has previously described similar instances of false stories on compromised news sites as information operations, often linked to a hacker group associated with the Belarusian government, identified as Ghostwriter.

Ghostwriter, also known as UNC1151 and Storm-0157, targets journalists through spearphishing emails to access their organisation’s content management systems. In addition, the group has targeted Ukrainian military personnel and Polish government services in phishing operations to steal email credentials, compromise websites, and disseminate malware.

In another incident aiming to fuel tensions in Poland, the hackers fabricated a news story about the murder of a priest by an alleged Iraqi migrant who allegedly entered from Lithuania, which turned out to be false.

These disinformation campaigns have plagued various entities, especially in the European region. Therefore, citizens should be more aware of the legitimacy of such articles, primarily if they are related to geopolitical issues, war, and malicious propaganda.