(PatriotWise.com)- Anonymous, the loose collective of hackers who often engage in cyber warfare on behalf of various political campaigns, has reportedly declared war against Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
A Twitter account labeled “Your Anon News,” which has over 6 million followers and claims to provide legitimate news about the cyber hacking collective, said on Thursday that the group is “currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation.”
It’s somewhat ironic, too, given that the Russian government is known for allowing gangs of criminal cyber hackers to attack foreign governments and businesses, often engaging in ransomware attacks that demand millions of dollars from American businesses in return for stolen or hacked data.
“We want the Russian people to understand that we know it’s hard for them to speak out against their dictator for fear of reprisals,” the Twitter account said.
#Anonymous is currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation. Our operations are targeting the Russian government. There is an inevitability that the private sector will most likely be affected too. While this account cannot claim to speak for the whole (con)
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) February 24, 2022
The statement added that the collective “want only peace in the world” as well as a “future for all of humanity.”
Russia Today, a state-owned Russian news network that is popular across several Western economies, announced soon afterward that it had experienced a major DDoS attack. This kind of attack, which is a “denial of service” attack, floods a website with a huge amount of fake traffic, effectively overloading the servers and stopping the website from being visible to genuine visitors to the site.
Anonymous’ threat appears to be legitimate, and it even went beyond Russian media. The official websites for the Kremlin, as well as the State Duma, were briefly made unavailable on Thursday before coming back online.
It’s probably something that Russia expected to come from Western governments, but not from Western vigilante hackers.
