A Twitter account associated with the Anonymous hacktivist movement reported that hackers are declaring war on the Russian government over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Shortly thereafter, the group claimed responsibility for taking down a number of government websites, the RT website, and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
It should be noted that yesterday there were indeed problems with access to kremlin.ru, as well as other government resources and banking sites, and RT representatives confirmed that they were under heavy DDoS attacks.
Currently, all of the listed sites are available, and the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NCCC) warned of the threat of “an increase in the intensity of computer attacks on Russian information resources, including critical information infrastructure.”
The Record, which also records the escalation of cyberattacks in linkage with the outbreak of a military conflict, noted that the Russian government seems to have taken protective measures. Thus, government sites, including the exclusively military domain mil.ru, have become inaccessible to foreign visitors – resources limit traffic from sources outside of Russia.
Actually, this means that the servers are now configured not to show the content of the site to people trying to access it from another country. Instead, visitors from blocked areas see a “418 I’m a teapot” error.
This error originated as a joke in the late 90s and is not part of any official standard. Usually, these errors are used as a kind of “inside joke” among network administrators to block incoming traffic. In particular, they are used in response to DDoS attacks and attempts to parse sites or APIs to inform attackers that their activities have been detected and actively blocked.
However, soon a merged database of the website of the Russian Ministry of Defence appeared on the network – mil.ru from Zer0Day Lab. Anonymous claimed responsibility for the hack. Please, decide for yourself how successful the attacks against the Russian government are and how ethical it is to leak this data into the network.
Let me remind you that we also wrote that the FBI and NSA release a statement about attacks by Russian hackers, and that Russian-speaking hackers attacked the government infrastructure of Poland.
