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Hacking collective Anonymous appears to declare war on Putin after Russia invades Ukraine

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Anonymous, an international hacking collective that has conducted cyberattacks against governments and corporations, appeared to declare war against Putin and Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine. 

The “YourAnonNews” Twitter account, which boasts 6.5 million followers, made the declaration on Thursday, saying that the hacking group is “currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation.”

A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist group "Anonymous," takes part in a protest in central Brussels.  

A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist group “Anonymous,” takes part in a protest in central Brussels.  
(REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo)

“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 decentralized hacking collective said.

“We, as a collective want only peace in the world. We want a future for all of humanity. So, while people around the globe smash your internet providers to bits, understand that it’s entirely directed at the actions of the Russian government and Putin.”

RT.com, a Russian government-funded media outlet that the U.S. State Department describes as a critical element in “Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” said that it was targeted in what appears to be a widespread denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. 

A DDoS attack is a coordinated effort to knock a website offline by flooding it with traffic. 

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE: LIVE UPDATES

Websites for the Kremlin and State Duma lower house of parliament were also intermittently unavailable on Thursday, which could have been caused by DDoS attacks. 

Several Ukrainian government websites were hit by cyberattacks on Thursday. 

Several Ukrainian government websites were hit by cyberattacks on Thursday. 
(REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

Ukraine Defense Ministry officials requested assistance from the country’s hacker underground on Thursday morning to beef up their cybersecurity defenses, Reuters reports. 

Yegor Aushev, the co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told the news outlet that offensive volunteers will conduct digital espionage against Russian forces, while defensive volunteers will help protect the country’s infrastructure. 

Ukrainian servicemen stand by a destroyed house near the frontline village of Krymske, Luhansk region, in eastern Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022. 

Ukrainian servicemen stand by a destroyed house near…

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China is building a sprawling network of missile silos, satellite imagery appears to show

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The likely missile field, comprising 120 silos that could potentially house weapons capable of reaching the United States mainland, was documented by researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies using satellite imagery supplied by commercial satellite company Planet Labs Inc.

The researchers compared satellite photos taken during the past four months with images captured within the past week, finding the missile site covering a grid of hundreds of square kilometers in China’s Gansu province, said researcher Jeffrey Lewis, a Chinese nuclear weapons expert who examined the images with colleague Decker Eveleth, the first person to spot the silos.

Lewis told CNN on Friday that most of the silo construction, which has yet to be completed, has likely occurred in the past six months.

“It’s really a startling pace of construction,” he said, adding that the scope of the buildup was also surprising.

“It’s a lot of silos,” Lewis said. “It’s much larger than anything we expected to see.”

Reports of the likely new missile field came just a day before Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in a nationalistic speech on the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary that China’s rise is a “historical inevitability” and it will no longer be “bullied, oppressed or subjugated” by foreign countries.

“Anyone who dares to try, will find their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” Xi added, in comments that later appeared to be softened in the government’s own English language translation.

Satellite images appear to show four Chinese missile silos at various stages of construction.

New protection for China’s ICBMs

Though researchers have identified 120 likely silos, there is no indication they are in use, or will be used into the future. However, analysts said the silos, placed in a grid pattern, at 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) intervals, could be used to house Chinese-made DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The DF-41, also known as the CSS-X-20, is estimated to have a range of 12,000 to 15,000 kilometers (7,400 to 9,300 miles) and could be equipped with up to 10 independently targeted nuclear warheads, according to the Missile Threat Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It is projected to be able to strike the…

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An Outage Hit Major Websites. The Internet’s Infrastructure Appears Shaky.

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Russia appears to carry out hack through system used by US aid agency

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Hackers linked to Russia’s main intelligence agency surreptitiously seized an email system used by the State Department’s international aid agency to burrow into the computer networks of human rights groups and other organizations of the sort that have been critical of President Vladimir Putin, Microsoft Corp. disclosed Thursday.



a large brick building: The headquarters for the US Agency for International Development is seen in Washington. The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted spear-phishing assault on US and foreign government agencies and think tanks using an email marketing account of the US Agency for International Development, Microsoft said, late Thursday.

© J. David Ake
The headquarters for the US Agency for International Development is seen in Washington. The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted spear-phishing assault on US and foreign government agencies and think tanks using an email marketing account of the US Agency for International Development, Microsoft said, late Thursday.

Discovery of the breach comes only three weeks before President Biden is scheduled to meet Putin in Geneva, and at a moment of increased tension between the two nations — in part because of a series of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks emanating from Russia.

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The newly disclosed attack was also particularly bold: By breaching the systems of a supplier used by the federal government, the hackers sent out genuine-looking emails to more than 3,000 accounts across more than 150 organizations that regularly receive communications from the United States Agency for International Development. Those emails went out as recently as this week, and Microsoft said it believes the attacks are ongoing.

The email was implanted with code that would give the hackers unlimited access to the computer systems of the recipients, from “stealing data to infecting other computers on a network,” Tom Burt, a Microsoft vice president, wrote Thursday night.

Last month, Biden announced a series of new sanctions on Russia and the expulsion of diplomats for a sophisticated hacking operation, called SolarWinds, that used novel methods to breach at least seven government agencies and hundreds of large US companies.

That attack went undetected by the US government for nine months, until it was discovered by a cybersecurity firm. In April, Biden said he could have responded far more strongly, but “chose to be proportionate” because he did not want “to kick off a…

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