Hacking group Anonymous has officially declared a cyber war against Russia as the country’s forces continue to advance into Ukraine.
The group made the declaration through Twitter and revealed that it had taken down several Russian government websites. Among the prominent websites affected include state-backed news platform Russia Today, accessible through the RT.com domain.
RT.com has since confirmed that the attack took place for an extended period. According to Anonymous, the Russian government uses the targeted websites to spread propaganda amid the ongoing war.
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By press, the Isitdownrightnow.com tool indicated that RT.com was still down. Notably, the website has caught the attention of the United Kingdom Members of Parliament, who called for the banning of the platform.
The group has also taken down other government websites like the defense ministry and the state Duma.
Anonymous threat to take down Russian systems
The declaration from Anonymous comes after the group threatened to take hostage Russia’s industrial control system if the Ukraine invasion proceeds. The group, a decentralized collective, has in the past targeted the CIA, Islamic State, and the Church of Scientology.
Anonymous used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that involved multiple systems overwhelming the targeted website to bar external traffic.
The group has been updating the members’ operations through various Twitter accounts. Worth noting is that Anonymous has no single Twitter handle since the group is a decentralized collective.
Notably, the war that began on Thursday took on a cyber attack angle, with Russia targeting several Ukrainian websites. The attack on Ukrainian systems came in data-wiping malware, which also infected hundreds of computers, even in neighboring countries.
Furthermore, Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency stated that mobile networks were also impacted by people struggling to make calls.
