In its brutal course war in UkraineThe Russian army burned the cities, civilians were raped and torturedand commitment many potential war crimes. On November 23, lawmakers across Europe overwhelmed Labeling Russia is a “state sponsor” of terrorism and calls for further cuts in relations with the country. The response to the statement is immediate. The website of the European Parliament is down DDoS attack.
A simple attack — which involved flooding a website with traffic making it inaccessible — disrupted the Parliament’s website, which had been offline for an extended period of time. . few hours. pro-Russian Killnet hacktivist group claimed responsibility for the attack. The hacktivist team has targeted hundreds of organizations around the world this year, with some limited success on a small scale causing websites to go down for short periods of time. It was a player in the larger boom in hacking.
The next years of sporadic hacktivist activity, 2022 has seen the re-emergence of hacking on a large scale. Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine has spawned numerous hacker groups on both sides of the conflict, while in Iran and Israel, so-called hacker groups are conducting increasingly destructive attacks. ruin. This new wave of hacktivism, which varies between groups and countries, comes with new tactics and approaches, and increasingly blurs the lines between hacktivism and government-sponsored attacks.
“I wouldn’t say hacking is dying, but it’s certainly going to die out for a while,” said Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, principal threat researcher at security firm SentinelOne. Guerrero-Saade explains that over the past four or five years, hacktivism has often existed at its extremes: low-level disruptions and more sophisticated attacks can mask a nation’s hacking activity. family. Guerrero-Saade said of the current situation: “You have a lot more players in the space and a much more solid middle ground between those two extremes.
Russia Invaded Ukraine in February promote an increase in hacktivism. The hacktivist collective that inherited Anonymous has been revived, but new groups have also been formed. of Ukraine Unprecedented IT army, a group of volunteer hackers from around the world, has repeatedly carried out DDoS attacks against the Russian targets outlined in their Telegram group. In June, a speech by Vladimir Putin was delay after a cyber attack. Groups affiliated with other hacker activists have carried out large-scale hacking and leak operations against Russian entities, resulting in the hundreds of gigabytes of data from Russia published online.
On the other side of the conflict, there are four main pro-Russian hacking groups, said Sergey Shykevich, director of the threat intelligence group at security firm Check Point. These are: Killnet, NoName 057, From Russia With Love, and XakNet. Killnet is probably the most active of these groups, Shykevich said. “Since April, they have targeted about 650 targets—only about 5% of which are Ukraine.” Its targets, like the European Parliament, are largely anti-Russian states. The group mainly uses DDoS attacks, is active on Telegram, is media friendly and attracts Russian speakers.
DDoS attacks still have an overwhelming place in modern hacktivism. An FBI notice, issued in early November, said those behind DDoS attacks had “minimal operational impact” on their victims. “Hackers often choose targets that are perceived to have a greater perceived impact than actual operational disruption,” the FBI said. In other words: Bites are usually worse than bites.
