Cloudflare, a US tech firm that protects companies against DDoS attacks, described the initial denial of service sorties last week as “relatively modest”. Ukrainian websites were hit with DDoS attacks ahead of the offensive, including the Ukrainian defence ministry and PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest commercial bank, but there has been nothing on the scale of the NotPetya assault in 2017 – when a devastating malware attack attributed to Russia destroyed computers in Ukraine and around the world. A spokesperson for the channel said: “After the statement by Anonymous, RT’s websites became the subject of massive DDoS attacks from some 100 million devices, mostly based in the US.”īy contrast, cyber activity against Ukraine has been muted so far, despite widespread predictions that a Russian military assault on the country would be combined with digital shock and awe. Russia Today openly attributed the problems with its website to Anonymous, and claimed the attacks came from the US after the group had published its “declaration of war”. One former Anonymous member has described its guiding principle as “anti-oppression”. Its targets in the past have included the CIA, the Church of Scientology and Islamic State, and although the collective was left reeling by a number of arrests in the US in the early 2010s, it revived activity after the murder of George Floyd. However, the Anonymous collective has a track record of conducting this sort of activity and it is very much in line with their capabilities.” Jamie Collier, a consultant at US cybersecurity firm Mandiant, said: “It can be difficult to directly tie this activity to Anonymous, as targeted entities will likely be reluctant to publish related technical data. The group’s nature as an informal collective makes it difficult to attribute these attacks to Anonymous definitively.

Internet users suspect that this may be another action by the hacker group #Anonymous, which declared a cyber war to Russia in connection with the attack on #Ukraine. They feature Ukrainian music and national symbols. Someone hacked into Russian state TV channels.

Any Other Name by Alex Nonymous