Cyber Security Magazine
The hacker group Anonymous announced on Saturday that it had hacked the website of the FSB, Russia’s feared secret service. We cannot access the site on Saturday evening at the time of publication of this article.
The FSB is the de facto successor of the KGB, the secret political police of the USSR. Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer and later headed the FSB before being appointed prime minister by Boris Yeltsin.
By analyzing the attack, it’s most probably a DDOS attack on the website, making it inaccessible to visitors. We don’t yet confirm that there have been any data breaches.
On February 25, the Anonymous international hacker group announced that it was launching attacks against the government of the Russian Federation, while the Russian private sector could also be affected. The group has already hacked 2,500 websites in Russia and Belarus to support Ukraine following this announcement.
Anonymous declares cyberwar against the Russian government
On February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Anonymous, one of the largest and most widely-known hacker groups, announced it is “officially in cyberwar against the Russian government.”
The damage did not take long to be felt. The next day, February 25, Anonymous breached the Russian Ministry of Defence’s database and posted it online for Ukraine and the world to see.
In the days after that, posts by the account claimed responsibility for disabling websites belonging to the Russian oil giant Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian news agency RT, and numerous Russian and Belarusian government agencies, including the Kremlin’s official site.
On February 28, for several minutes, the websites of state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, the daily Kommersant, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia and the magazine Forbes Russia displayed a message calling for an “end” to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On February 26, the websites of the Kremlin, the Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament), and the Russian Ministry of Defense were decommissioned in an attack also claimed by Anonymus on Twitter.
