sites offline
Ukraine war: Hacker collective Anonymous declares cyber war on the Kremlin
A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Anonymous has carried out several attacks on Russian websites.
© Belinda Jiao/ / Picture Alliance
After the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the hacker collective Anonymous spoke out. The group declared “cyber war” against Russia and has already achieved its first goals.
The increasing importance of technical infrastructure is evident in Russia’s war against Ukraine. It has been suspected for weeks that Russia is launching cyber attacks against Ukraine. Now Russia itself had to accept at least a small setback.
Ukraine war: “Russia Today” and other websites offline
According to the anonymous hacker collective Anonymous, which is not organized centrally, it has declared a “cyber war” on Russia and forced several Russian websites to shut down in an initial attack. Among other things, the Kremlin, the Russian state medium “RT News” (formerly “Russia Today”) and several service providers could not be reached.
After hours of failure on Thursday, the broadcaster reported a suspected cyber attack. The pages were available again on Friday. It is unclear whether the systems were really hacked during the incident or were paralyzed with a so-called DDoS attack. In a DDoS attack, servers are called up in parallel with such a large number of calls that the server’s computing power is no longer sufficient. Websites can then no longer be accessed via the server, or only very slowly. In contrast to a hack, however, no data can be stolen in a DDoS attack.
Anonymous: “Mr. Putin, you can’t get away with that”
Anonymous addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin directly on Twitter: “Mr. Putin, you have invaded a sovereign nation in the name of Russian hegemony and your actions have threatened peace and stability in the region. You cannot get away with this!”