Hacking group Anonymous declares cyber-war on Russia, takes down govt. websites

Anonymous, a decentralized international hacking collective, announced that it was engaging in cyberwarfare against Moscow over the decision to invade Ukraine in a “special military operation.”

The declaration was made Thursday afternoon on the “YourAnonNews” Twitter account, which has 6.8 million followers and has become a hub of news related to the hacking collective.

“#Anonymous is currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation. Our operations are targeting the Russian government,” it wrote.

#Anonymous is currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation. Our operations are targeting the Russian government. There is an inevitability that the private sector will most likely be affected too. While this account cannot claim to speak for the whole (con)

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) February 24, 2022

“We, as a collective want only peace in the world.  We want a future for all of humanity,” it added in a subtweet. “So, while people around the globe smash your internet providers to bits, understand that it's entirely directed at the actions of the Russian government and Putin.”

The account noted that it does speak for the whole of the collective.

One target that was quickly taken down was Russia Today, or RT, a state-run TV channel, which was down through early Friday from a cyberattack.

A RT spokesman told Vice News on Friday that “after a statement by [hacker collective] Anonymous, RT’s websites became the subject of massive DDoS attacks from some 100 million devices, mostly based in the U.S. Due to the attacks there might be temporary website access limitations for some users, yet RT is promptly resolving these issues.”

A DDoS attack, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service, is meant to knock a website offline by flooding it with traffic from many computers at once.  

Other Anonymous targets include Russian internet service providers, state oil company Gazprom and Russian government websites, according to tweets from YourAnonNews and YourAnonTV, another account that shares news about the group.

The collective claimed to breach the database of the Russian Ministry of Defense, making a copy accessible to everyone via Twitter before it was taken down for violating the platform’s rules.

Anonymous has antagonized a broad range of targets over the last two decades, including governments, corporations, and the Church of Scientology. It notably attacked payment provider PayPal for cutting off WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, then its editor-in-chief, for releasing hundreds of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. 

Russia-based ransomware group Conti declared that it is siding with Moscow on Ukraine and threatened to retaliate against any hackers that target the country.

“The Conti Team is officially announcing a full support of Russian government. If anybody will decide to organize a cyberattack or any war activities against Russia, we are going to use all our possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures,” read the announcement.