Anonymous announced a 'cyber war' against Russia

Key takeaways: 

• Three weeks back, a famous Twitter account called "Anonymous" announced that the shadowy activist group was waging a "cyberwar" against Russia.
• Since then, the account has asserted blame for disabling central Russian government, news, and corporate websites and leaking data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency liable for censoring Russian media.

Anonymous waging war against Russia: 

Three weeks ago, a famous Twitter account called "Anonymous" announced that the shadowy activist group was waging a "cyberwar" against Russia.

Since then, the account — which has almost 7.9 million followers, with several 500,000 gained since Russia's attack of Ukraine — has claimed blame for undermining prominent Russian government, news, and corporate websites and revealing data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency answerable for censoring Russian media.

But is any of that real?

It seems it is, says Jeremiah Fowler, a co-founder of Security Discovery's cybersecurity firm. He worked with researchers at the website Planet to confirm the group's claims.

"Anonymous has confirmed to be a competent group that has penetrated some high-value targets, records, and databases in the Russian Federation," he noted in a report outlining the findings.  

Hacked databases

Of 100 Russian databases studied, 92 had been compromised, stated Fowler.

They belonged to dealers, Russian internet providers, and intergovernmental websites, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, an association made up of Russia and other ex-Soviet nations formed in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Numerous CIS files were erased, hundreds of folders were renamed to "putin_stop_this_war," and email addresses and administrative credentials were revealed, said Fowler, who compared it to 2020′s nasty "MeowBot" attacks, which "had no meaning besides for a malicious script that wiped out data and renamed all the files."