Powered by MOMENTUM MEDIA
cyber daily logo

Breaking news and updates daily. Subscribe to our Newsletter

Breaking news and updates daily. Subscribe to our Newsletter X facebook linkedin Instagram Instagram

Anonymous hacker group declares cyber war on Russia

Russian media channels were reportedly broadcasting patriotic Ukrainian songs after the Anonymous hacker group declared cyber war against Putin’s regime, with the official Kremlin website, kremlin.ru, affected by an outage on Saturday along with six other Russian state websites as the war in Ukraine escalates.

user icon Nastasha Tupas
Mon, 28 Feb 2022
Anonymous hacker group declares cyber war on Russia
expand image

In the days since a tweet from an account linked to Anonymous, going by the handle @YourAnonOne, stated that it had Vladimir Putin's regime in its sights the Anonymous hacker group has claimed credit for several cyber incidents.

This includes distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) – where a site is rendered unreachable by being bombarded with traffic – that have brought down government websites and that of Russia Today, the state-backed news service. The DDoS attacks still appeared to be working on Sunday afternoon, with the official sites for the Kremlin and Ministry of Defence still inaccessible. It came after Ukraine's vice prime minister said it had launched an “IT army” to combat Russia in cyber space.

According to Anonymous, it had hacked the Ministry of Defence database, while the Kyiv Independent reported Russian state TV channels had been hacked, posting pro-Ukraine content including patriotic songs and images from the invasion.

Anonymous tweeted: "#Anonymous is at war with Russia. Stay tuned," claiming responsibility for the attacks in a post.

Russia Today attributed the problems with its website to Anonymous, and claimed the attacks came from the US after the group had published its declaration of war. According to a spokesperson for the channel, RTs websites became the subject of massive DDoS attacks from some 100 million devices, mostly based in the US, following the statement by Anonymous.

Anonymous is a decentralised hacktivist group with no hierarchy or leadership whose mission is to combat establishment hypocrisy and corruption.

The latest move comes after the collectives Twitter account declared on Thursday that the group was currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation.

We want the Russian people to understand that we know its hard for them to speak out against their dictator for fear of reprisals, they stated.

Last week, Ukraine was hit by an attempted wiper attack, via a new strain of malware dubbed HermeticWiper that prevented computers from rebooting. The scale of the attack left only several hundred machines affected and its geographic reach beyond Ukraine has been limited to Latvia and Lithuania.

Ukraines Defence Ministry called out to volunteer hackers on Thursday after Ukrainian banks were affected by the cyber attacks, all of which Russia has denied responsibility for.

A number of social media platforms have also taken action in order to curb Russian misinformation being distributed, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, preventing Russian channels from running ads and generating revenue from their platforms.

On the flip side, partial restrictions have been imposed on Facebook by the Russian government after officials who have accused the social network of censoring state-backed media on the platform, which then prompted Facebook to ban ads from Russian state media. Googles YouTube platform has also banned state media adverts, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has confirmed broadband internet access is now available in Ukraine via his Starlink satellites.

[Related: ACSC on high alert following Russian attack on Ukraine]

cd intro podcast

Introducing Cyber Daily, the new name for Cyber Security Connect

Click here to learn all about it
newsletter
cyber daily subscribe
Be the first to hear the latest developments in the cyber industry.