Global hacking group Anonymous launches ‘cyber war’ against Russia

 The online hacking activist, or “hacktivist,” group Anonymous, whose adherents often disguise their identities with Guy Fawkes masks, is claiming responsibility for disruptions to Russian and Belarusian-backed websites. Avaneesh Parasar

The murky online group known as Anonymous appears to be wading into the Ukraine-Russia conflict by declaring it is at cyber war against President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Twitter post from an account named “Anonymous” — with 7.4 million followers and nearly 190,000 Tweets — summoned hackers around the world to target Russia.

A post from the account on Feb. 24 stated the loosely connected global group was gearing up for action against the country — “and we will be retweeting their endeavors,” it said.

In the days thereafter, posts by the account claimed responsibility for disabling websites belonging to the Russian oil giant Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian news agency RT, and numerous Russian and Belarusian government agencies, including the Kremlin’s official site.

Subsequent posts took credit for disrupting Russian internet service providers, leaking documents and emails from the Belarusian weapons manufacturer Tetraedr, and shutting down a gas supply provided by the Russian telecommunications service Tvingo Telecom.

The account holder summarized the group’s intentions in a Twitter post last week, which stated: “Anonymous has ongoing operations to keep .ru government website offline, and to push information to the Russian people so they can be free of Putin’s state censorship machine. We also have ongoing operations to keep the Ukrainian people online as best we can.”

“Russia may be using bombs to drop on innocent people, but Anonymous uses lasers to kill Russian government websites,” read a post on Feb. 26.

No official account

Despite the account’s large following, the person — or persons — behind the “Anonymous” Twitter account denied that it is the group’s official account, stating in a post: “We are a decentralized resistance movement. There is no official #Anonymous account.”

It’s one of many Twitter accounts that purport to act under the larger umbrella of Anonymous-affiliated social media accounts, although it appears to be one of the largest.

Substantiating the group’s claims is difficult, if not impossible, since anonymity is a key tenet of the collective.

A review of a website that checks server outages confirmed that many of the websites that the group claimed to have knocked down are currently — or were recently — disabled.

An article on RT published on Feb. 28 confirmed that its own website, as well as that of the Kremlin, had in fact been shuttered by Anonymous last Friday. The article also stated the group had targeted other Russian and Belarusian media outlets on Monday, replacing their main pages with the message “Stop the war.”

A global coalescence

Attracting the ire of online hackers is yet another example of how global players — from NATO powers and international businesses to everyday consumers — are using their leverage, big or small, to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.