Anonymous hacktivists have announced on Twitter that they have started a war with Russia over a special operation in Ukraine. The group is known for its massive DDoS attacks, declassification of government documents and hacking into politicians' accounts. I talked to information security experts and found out how "anonymous" can harm Russia. The hacker group Anonymous declared cyberwar on Russia, they wrote about it in their official Twitter account.
"The Anonymous Collective officially declares war on Russia," the group said in a statement. The hackers also added the Ukraine hashtag to the post.
The cybersecurity experts interviewed are confident that a real threat may be hidden behind the Anonymous statement.
“DDoS attacks are the simplest thing that can happen. Government websites, state online services, for example, State Services, e-mail, social media accounts of political figures, websites and IT infrastructure of state banks, enterprises of the military-industrial complex, may be under the gun,” said the head of the information security audit department of Infosecurity a Softline Company Sergei Nenakhov.
According to him, this community has repeatedly manifested itself in hacktivism, hacking government websites, e-mails of politicians from different countries. They also showed themselves in the online fight against ISIS (the organization is banned in Russia) [the organization is banned on the territory of the Russian Federation], obtaining and publishing information about members of a terrorist organization.
Group-IB noted that the danger lies in the fact that other groups may operate under the guise of Anonymous, including pro-state hacker groups targeting critical infrastructure.
“As for Anonymous, they act as follows: first, they are in public communities, for example, on Twitter, they call for attacks on certain organizations as part of a particular campaign. In order for users to easily identify these attacks, they usually use special hashtags for each event and the Anonymous hashtag. Young hackers without professional skills and abilities can join these campaigns. However, the strength of such actions is precisely in the mass character of hacktivists,” the company explained.
Fedor Dbar, commercial director of Code of Security, believes that much will depend on who the group attacks.
“Attacks on critical information infrastructure (CII) objects can bear the most serious consequences, but it cannot be said that “tomorrow we will be left without light or electricity.”
Such a development is unlikely, since the processes for the protection of CII have been going on in Russia for a long time. Great efforts have been made to secure such facilities and state structures have all the necessary resources to effectively counter such threats,” Dbara said.
Dbar's fears were confirmed by Dmitry Lifanov, Leading Analyst of the Jet CSIRT IS Monitoring and Incident Response Center of Jet Infosystems.
“As part of its activities, the group can organize DDoS attacks on resources, compromise and publish confidential and personal data of both commercial and government organizations. Also, Anonymous, by hacking social networks, can publish on behalf of the victim,” the expert said, pointing out that Anonymous has done this before.
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