A new participant has been added to the Russia-Ukraine conflict: the anonymous hacker community. The unknown hackers said that they had taken down a number of official Russian websites, as well as the state-run TV network’s website, RT.com.
In a tweet last week, the hacking group said that it was going to fight the Russian government in a “cyber war.” The Russian government, the Kremlin, the Duma, and the Ministry of Defence are among the websites that have been knocked down or slowed down by Anonymous. The hacker also launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the websites of Russian internet service providers, such as Com2Com, Sovam Teleport, and PTT-Teleport Moscow.
Several anonymous accounts were identified on Twitter using the hashtags #OpRussia and #OpKremlin, similar to the earlier #OpISIS campaign to disrupt the terrorist organization’s online propaganda efforts. In Ukraine, there were several cyberattacks against government websites, a few banks, and other IT companies. Ukraine claimed that Russia was responsible for the assault.
According to the latest research by Chainalysis, Russia-linked hackers received 74% of all the money made from ransomware attacks in 2021. Over $400 million in cryptocurrency payments were made to organisations “very likely to be affiliated with Russia.” Meanwhile, Russia denied the allegations.
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