Anonymous Hacktivists Breach Russian Databases, Leak 'Massive' Amounts of Data

"The Anonymous declaration of cyberwar was a top news story despite no evidence," writes cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler (an American who worked in Kyiv for the last 10 years - until fleeing in February to Poland). To investigate, Fowler performed a random sampling of 100 exposed Russian databases - and discovered that 92 of them had indeed been compromised. "Anti-Russian hackers used a similar script to the infamous 'MeowBot' that changed the name of folders and deleted the contents of the files. " (For example, renaming the folders to "putin_stop_this_war".) And that was just the beginning, reports CNBC:Anonymous has claimed to have hacked over 2,500 Russian and Belarusian sites, said Fowler. In some instances, stolen data was leaked online, he said, in amounts so large it will take years to review. "The biggest development would be the overall massive number of records taken, encrypted or dumped online," said Fowler. Shmuel Gihon, a security researcher at the threat intelligence company Cyberint, agreed that amount of leaked data is "massive." "We currently don't even know what to do with all this information, because it's something that we haven't expected to have in such a short period of time," he said.... The more immediate outcome of the hacks, Fowler and Gihon agreed, is that Russia's cybersecurity defenses have been revealed as being far weaker than previously thought. Fowler's report argues that Anonymous has "rewritten the rules of how a crowdsourced modern cyberwar is conducted" - with the group also offering penetration testing to Ukraine, "finding vulnerabilities before Russia could exploit them." But in addition, Fowler writes, Anonymous's efforts have also "transformed into a larger operation that spread far beyond the Russian government, companies, or organizations, and included an information campaign aimed at Russian citizens." Some examples: Hacking Printers - Russian censorship has blocked many inside the country from knowing the true scale of the war and Russian losses. Anonymous hacked printers across Russia and printed uncensored facts or anti-propaganda and pro-ukrainian messages. The group claims to have printed over 100,000 documents. This also includes barcode printers at grocery stores where prices were changed and product names were changed to anti-war or pro-Ukrainian slogans.... RoboDial, SMS, and Email Spam - Almost everyone on earth has received some form of spam in the form of a phone call, text, or email message. These usually try to sell a service or scam victims out of money. Now this same technology has been used to bypass Russian censorship and inform citizens of news and messages they are forbidden to learn on state sponsored propaganda channels. Anonymous affiliated Squad303 claimed to have sent over 100 million messages to Russian devices.

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