Anonymous Cyberattacks on Russia
Hacktivist group Anonymous has embarrassed Russian companies and government agencies Jeremiah Fowler, co founder of cybersecurity company Security Discovery, said Anonymous has claimed to have hacked over 2,500 Russian and Belarusian sites.
In some instances, stolen data was leaked online in amounts so large it will take years to review.
- The hacking collective claim they have taken down four government websites
- Anonymous ended their announcement of successful hacking with ‘Blyat Putin!’
- Last week, they hacked into Russia’s media censorship agency and released 340,000 files from Roskomnadzor federal agency, stealing classified documents.
Anonymous claims they have taken action against Russia once again by targeting their government websites in another attack against of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Anonymous took to Twitter to announce the websites they claim to have successfully brought down, including FSB, the Russian intelligence service.
Using the military term ‘Tango down’, the organisation listed four websites that they hacked into.
Moscow.ru, Analytical Center for the Government of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Sport of the Russian Federation, and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which is the main successor agency of the Soviet Union’s KGB, were all taken over by Anonymous, the hackers claim.
Anonymous also leaked private correspondence which they claim to be between Vladimir Putin and Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, outlining plans to cut down Ukrainian forests and use the timber.
The letter, shown in a subsequent tweet, is allegedly from minister Shoigu, and reads: ‘Dear Vladimir, In order to create fortifications to provide formations, military units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation involved in the special military operation, felling is required on defence lands and other categories, followed by the use of the resulting wood by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.’
It went on to read that the funds will be used ‘in the interests of defence’.
The hacker collective signed off their series of tweets today with a Russian expletive to the President: ‘Blyat Putin!’
Last week, Anonymous claimed to have hacked into Russia’s media censorship agency and released 340,000 files from Roskomnadzor federal agency, stealing classified documents which they then passed on to transparency organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), who published them online.
The trove of 820 gigabytes of emails and attachments, some of which are dated as late as March 5, show how the Kremlin is censoring anything referring to their brutal invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow is instead calling a ‘special military operation’.
CNBC’s Monica Pitrelli reports.