Who are the Anonymous group and why they are censoring Russian state media

The international hacktivist group Anonymous has made a public declaration of cyberwar against Russia after military operations or an invasion was launched on Ukraine.

It is one of the biggest hacker groups or a collective in the modern day.

Who are the Anonymous group?

The group’s nature is ‘an informal collective’. They are an ‘internet-based, international team from literally all over the world,’ as per their Twitter bio.

The group originated with a 4chan raid in 2003 and went on to target the Church of Scientology, Donald Trump and the United Nations in the recent past.

They have no particular political affiliation. They work towards causes such as opposing censorship and government control and promoting freedom of speech.

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Sporting Guy Fawkes masks, portrayed in V for Vendetta, the group remains a decentralised online community aiming at coordinated virtual attacks.

It was in 2008 that the group gained momentum when they launched a series of attacks against the Church of Scientology.

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In 2010, the group was responsible for cyberattacks on Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal after they blocked payments to whistleblower WikiLeaks.

Over the years Anonymous has grown and has targetted nations by blocking their official websites such as those of the United States, Israel, Tunisia, Uganda – and now Russia.

Anonymous goes after its targets vigorously and strategically. The various ways it attacks is by crashing web servers, website defacement, and leaking hacked private information.

Why is the group censoring Russian state media?

In a video posted online by the hacker group, the Anonymous group declared a ‘cyber war’ on Russia and President Vladimir Putin who declared a full military invasion against Ukraine. On Thursday, the collective took to Twitter to inform that it had Putin’s regime in its sights.

Since then, they have launched a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS attack is when a website becomes unreachable after it is bombarded with traffic. This has brought down government websites and websites of Russian state media.

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As per a report by The Guardian, the official sites for the Kremlin and Ministry of Defence remained inaccessible till Sunday afternoon.

The hacktivist group also claimed responsibility for hacking the Ministry of Defence database, while on Sunday it was claimed the group had hacked Russian state TV channels, posting pro-Ukraine content including patriotic songs and images from the invasion.

Russia Today, the state-backed news service openly attributed the problems with its website to Anonymous. They also claimed that the attacks came from the US after the group had published its “declaration of war”.

A spokesperson for the channel told the publication that “After the statement by Anonymous, RT’s websites became the subject of massive DDoS attacks from some 100 million devices, mostly based in the US.”

Since the conflict began, Russia has restricted the usage of Facebook and Twitter for some users. Facebook and Google have banned Russian state media adverts on their platforms. Elon Musk has provided satellite internet access to Ukraine via Starlink satellites.

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