Over the past few weeks, Nebula, a hacker collective, posted evidence of having executed cyber-attacks on Russia’s critical infrastructure, culminating in a successful mission to take Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) offline for more than a week.
Dr. Jan Kallberg, Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and Fellow at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point said that the “ability to uphold fear and a Russian domestic authority is key for the FSB,” which is why “a successful hacker attack challenges both fear and authority because the hacker shows no fear and doesn’t care about the FSB’s power and authority.”
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In the eyes of Malcolm Nance, a career military intelligence expert, “Any cyber hacking collective that fights [the FSB] is saving the world.”
Nance said that the FSB works with “Russian Army Intelligence the GRU” as “a globally malicious force that seeks to destroy Democratic ideology. They don’t attack a nation militarily, they hack people’s minds as well as interactions with the world and replace it with lies, deceptions and mistruths.”
Some have mused what the X (formerly Twitter) handle of the collective, “RUanonymous00x,” might mean with some interpreting it to perhaps mean “Russia Anonymous” while others think that it could stand for “Are you anonymous”?
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Whatever their affiliation or non-affiliation to Anonymous, the group took offline a number of online resources in Moscow itself, including the Moscow Metro’s website and the card payment service that Muscovites use to pay for metro rides.
Expanding outside of the territory of Russia, the collective knocked-down websites associated with the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic,” including websites that appeared to have email and government services connected to them – hence blocking occupiers in eastern Ukraine from being able to carry-out work.
Likewise, the Moscow-backed “Supreme Court of the Luhansk People’s Republic” and “Parliament” of the “Luhansk People’s Republic” were hit.
Reaching into Belarus, the hackers hit BelToll – the national highway toll service and Belta – the official news information service of the Belarussian Government, after which the hackers left a message, in broken English, indicating a strong opposition to the regimes of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko, saying that “the terror propagandists,” of the Belarussian government news source should know that the collective “will make worse yes… Expect us until the terrorists are gone. Putin must fall, Russia must be free.”
Another message called on the Russian FSB to “Please kindly do the work on Putin, you can be the hero of our people. You have duty to us yes, not the mad tsar?” Yet another note called on Russian authorities to “stop the mad man before he takes us too far.”
Looking at the attack, said Pyotr Kurzin, a specialist in the region, said that “Russia is as vulnerable as anyone,” continuing that this attack provided evidence that “despite what the Kremlinites will claim, this information war is happening.”
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