Hackers jeopardise crowdfunding campaign of prominent Russian news outlet

A major Russian independent media outlet, battered by a recent “foreign agent” designation, says that its last-ditch crowdfunding campaign has been undermined by a hacking attack.

Meduza last week became the latest victim of Russia’s repressive foreign agent law that labels organisations with foreign funding and saddles them with mountains of red tape for alleged “political activity”.

For Meduza, an independent newsroom created on the ruins of a popular website decimated by the Kremlin’s attack on free media in the aftermath of the 2014 Crimea annexation, the designation is akin to a death sentence.

The publication lost most of its advertising contracts in a matter of days as the foreign agent label spooked many of its clients.

In a last-ditch attempt to save the website, Meduza, which emerged in recent years as the go-to source of independent news from Russia, launched a crowdfunding campaign last week to try to stay afloat. The publication said on Wednesday that it has spotted an ingenious hacking attack that could undermine its entire fundraising campaign.

Unknown hackers started signing up for monthly donations within hours, using stolen bank cards, Meduza said.

“This could hurt our crowdfunding campaign as we’d be wasting money paying commission on refunds, and the customer service would be inundated with calls from people whose data were stolen,” Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief of Meduza, told the Telegraph on Thursday.

The hacking attack that Mr Kolpakov described as deliberate was first spotted by the payment system that processes the donations which showed invalid email accounts associated with the cards.

Meduza had to temporarily stop accepting bank cards for payments before it resolved the issue.

Russian hackers in recent years have been described as tools of the Kremlin infiltrating critical infrastructure and even trying to meddle in the 2016 US elections.

The Kremlin denied suggestions that the Russian authorities were stifling free press by putting the foreign agent label on Meduza, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov last week went as far as to suggest that the media landscape would not blink if one media outlet were to disappear.

Meduza which has evolved from a news website to a multi-platform media outlet has been credited for its wide reach across Russia and easy-to-digest, balanced reporting.

The website’s founders registered it in Latvia in 2014 in a bid to minimise the risks of having the headquarters in Moscow.

Mr Kolpakov on Thursday described the designation as the government’s assault to “kill our entire business.”

“Meduza can’t survive as the big publication it is solely on crowdfunding,” he said.

“It’s going to take us years to rebuild what has been destroyed.”

Since the foreign agent designation was announced on Friday, the news outlet shut down its offices in Riga and in Moscow and cut the staff’s salaries by 30 to 50 per cent as a desperate cost-cutting measure.

The blacklisting has "shocked" Meduza's reporters as an overwhelming majority of their government sources are now wary of speaking to the publication which has been "branded enemy of the state," Mr Kolpakov said.