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Putin reflection in a pair of glasses
Photo: Vladimir Konstantinov / REUTERS
After the announcement by the activist collective Anonymous that it would attack Russian government and state-media websites, the first effects are evident.
The Kremlin's official website, kremlin.ru, which had repeatedly struggled with failures in the past few days, was again unavailable on Saturday evening.
The website of the Russian Ministry of Defense is also currently offline.
It is currently not clear whether members of the loose collective are actually behind the attacks.
The same applies to the websites of the government portal government.ru or the Russian state and propaganda medium RT.
Anyone who calls up the pages will only get to their destination with a lot of luck, as they are probably under considerable load from DDoS attacks.
In such attacks, servers are flooded with an artificially generated mass of calls until they collapse under the load.
"Hacktivists" on both sides
A few days ago, during the war with Russia, the Ukrainian government had called on hackers to work for their home country, as the Reuters news agency reported.
A request appeared in hacker forums that was probably discontinued on behalf of the government.
»Ukrainian cyber community!
It's time to get involved in our country's cyber defense," the post said.
Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he wrote the post at the request of a senior Defense Ministry official
The call followed the discovery of malware in Ukraine by an IT security company.
In the middle of last week, a so-called "wiper" was discovered on hundreds of computers across the country.
This type of malware aims to make the data on an infected hard drive permanently unusable (to wipe).
The victims appeared to include government agencies and a financial institution.
It was only at the beginning of January that IT experts observed a similar wiper attack on the Ukrainian government's system.
A Twitter account attributed to the activist collective Anonymous hinted on Saturday that it will intensify the campaign against Putin's regime: "We are convinced that sanctions against Putin's criminal regime will have no effect...#Anonymous will be this afternoon intensify the cyber attacks on the Kremlin".
rai/Reuters
