Anonymous says it also attacked the official website of the Russian Stock Exchange which, at the time of publishing this article, was offline.
Anonymous hacktivists collective are claiming to have targeted top Russian government websites in a series of DDoS attacks. As a result, the official website of the Federal Security Service (aka FSB, the principal security agency of Russia), Stock Exchange, Analytical Center for the Government of the Russian Federation, and Ministry of Sport of the Russian Federation have been forced to go offline.
For your information, in a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service attack), a website or service is bombarded with a high volume of internet traffic until it stops functioning and eventually goes offline.
The full list of targeted institutions along with their domain addresses are as follow:
- FSB – Fsb.gov.ru
- Russian Stock Exchange – Moex.com
- Moscow International Portal – Moscow.ru
- Ministry of Sport of the Russian Federation – Minsport.gov.ru
- Analytical Center for the Government of the Russian – Ac.gov.ru
The cyberattack, which was part of Anonymous’ ongoing operation called OpRussia, took place around 12:12 PM (GMT), March 15th, 2022. However, the severity of the attack can be quantified by the fact that almost seven hours have passed since the attack took place, yet all targeted websites were still unreachable and offline for visitors.
On Twitter, @YourAnonNews, one of the largest social media representatives of the Anonymous movement shared several screenshots showing targeted domains and their current service status.
At the time of writing all targeted websites were offline.
Anonymous siding with Ukraine
As you may already know Russia has come under the radar of hacktivists, particularly the Anonymous collective, after the country invaded Ukrainian territories on February 24th, 2022. Since then, Russian IT infrastructure is being targeted every other day including government websites, State-run TV channels, online video streaming platforms, etc.
However, the group’s most significant attack took place last week when one of its affiliates hacked over 400 surveillance cameras in Russia. The hacktivists then defaced the compromised cameras with messages against President Putin and in support of Ukraine.
The second attack, which is ongoing, is being set up by Squad303, a newly formed digital army comprising Anonymous-associated programmers. In the first stage of the attack, the group sent out 7 million text messages to random Russian citizens across the country urging them to protest against the Russian attack on Ukraine.
Details of both attacks are available here.
