Kazakhstan launched a criminal probe into suspected hacking on Thursday, after a giant LED screen in the capital Astana displayed a Ukrainian flag while Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting.
The image of a billowing blue and yellow flag appeared on a huge screen by a busy road in central Astana on Wednesday evening, shortly after Putin arrived for an official visit, videos posted on social media showed.
Giant screens nearby were displaying Russian flags, the videos showed. The footage, which has not been verified, has been shown on Kazakh media.
Police and the State Technical Service, a state enterprise in charge of Kazakhstan’s cybersecurity, confirmed they were investigating.
The State Technical Service said on its website “an image of a flag was shown for a short time” on the screen, without naming the country the flag represented.
“According to provisional information, the attack was carried out with foreign IP addresses using proxy servers,” it said.
The company said it was trying to find out where the attack came from and how hackers had apparently broken into the display.
Kazakh police said they had launched an investigation at Keruen Media, the firm which supplied the LED screens, into “possible unlawful interference in the functioning of the company’s equipment”.
Independent news site Orda posted a video of a worker at the company, who blamed an electrical fault for making a Russian flag appear to be Ukrainian.
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