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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.
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.
#Anonymous is at war with Russia. Stay tuned. #OpRussia #StopRussia #OpKremlin #FreeUkraine pic.twitter.com/uUOSfadPz9
— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) February 26, 2022
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, “RT’s 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 collective’s 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 it’s hard for them to speak out against their dictator for fear of reprisals,” they stated.
#Anonymous took down Russia Today, Putin's propaganda machine.#SlavaUkraini #SlavaUkraine #UkraineRussiaWar
— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) February 27, 2022
Read:https://t.co/vff3QffbkM https://t.co/wTgfukDPsL
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.
Ukraine’s 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. Google’s 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]
Nastasha is a Journalist at Momentum Media, she reports extensively across veterans affairs, cyber security and geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific. She is a co-author of a book titled The Stories Women Journalists Tell, published by Penguin Random House. Previously, she was a Content Producer at Verizon Media, a Digital Producer for Yahoo! and Channel 7, a Digital Journalist at Sky News Australia, as well as a Website Manager and Digital Producer at SBS Australia. Nastasha started her career in media as a Video Producer and Digital News Presenter at News Corp Australia.
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