Kushagra Bansal – Mumbai Uncensored, 2nd March 2022
The infamous hacker group called Anonymous has waged a cyber war against Russia, amid their invasion of Ukraine.
The hacker group announced this through a tweet on 25th February 2022. “The Anonymous collective is officially in cyberwar against the Russian government” the tweet said. Since then, they have been involved in hacking the state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti as well as websites of some newspaper agencies Kommersant and Izvestiya and Forbes Russia magazine.
The group posted a message on the Forbes Russia website which read as “In a few years we’ll live like in North Korea. What’s in it for us? For Putin to make the history books? It isn’t our war, let’s end it!”. Followed by “This message will be deleted and some of us will be sacked and even jailed. But we can’t stand this any longer”.
On 26th February, Anonymous said it will hack Russian state channels to display the reality of what’s happening in Ukraine. A lot of people in Russia tweeted with a video of their TVs where Ukrainian songs and national anthems were being played.
Recently, Anonymous group hacked the websites of Kremlin, the defense ministry of Russia as well as the website of the Lower House of Parliament, Duma as claimed by Anonymous through Twitter. People experienced denial of service (DDOS) while accessing these websites. Netblocks, a web monitoring website noticed that Russians experienced delays in accessing the websites of Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline and Megafon, some of the main phone and network operators in Russia.
Although publicly all of these attacks can be attributed to the Anonymous, the way they work makes it very difficult to trace or track them. Even if the Russian government is able to do that, it is highly unlikely that they would share the information with the outside world.
State newspaper Russia Today blamed the hacker group for all the attacks stating that these attacks came from about 100 million devices based in the US. The occurrence and the way these attacks were conducted is similar to the group’s previous attacks on CIA, ISIS, Minneapolis Police Department, etc.
