Hackers from the Anonymous collective are said to have hacked the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor. A huge amount of data has been released to the public.
Moscow – The hacker group Anonymous also supports Ukraine in the war against Russia. In the Ukraine conflict, there have already been offensives against Russian state television and some Russian streaming providers, and daily newspapers have also been attacked. Now there should have been a new attack. This time the Russian federal authority Roskomnadzor was affected.
Hackers from the Anonymous collective apparently managed to hack into the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor. The agency is responsible for media surveillance and censorship. “Anonymous successfully penetrated the Roskomnadzor database (…) and made over 360,000 files public,” the group said on Twitter on Thursday (03/10/2022).
Ukraine War: Anonymous Member Allegedly Hacked Russian Federal Agency
It should also be about censored documents, as the Jerusalem Post reports. Among them are those who show that Moscow has censored everything related to the war as a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) claims to have published the huge amount of data (about 800 GB) online. They are said to have been stolen from the Russian censorship agency Roskomnadzor by a member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.
JUST IN: #Anonymous has successfully breached and leaked the database of Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring #Russian mass media, releasing to the public over 360K files. #OpRussia https://t.co/m5wvoDGNPh
— Anonymous TV 🇺🇦 (@YourAnonTV) March 10, 2022
The information was probably published now that the activist group fears that Russia could soon be cut off from the Internet. “The source, affiliated with Anonymous, believed that it was imperative for the Russian people to have access to information about their government. They also objected to the fact that the Russian people are cut off from independent media and the outside world,” it is quoted as saying US Forbes Magazine from a release by DDoSecrets.
Secret data released by Russian federal agency: “They seem to be real”
According to the Distributed Denial of Secrets, the data should come from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan, as Vice reports. The republic is located in the west of the country. “They appear to be genuine, but of course I can’t vouch for all of them,” a Russian journalist told vice.de. “I don’t see anything really surprising at the moment.”
Several independent media outlets have already been shut down or blocked in Russia, including the social networks Facebook and Twitter. The US corporations had previously been fined several times for not deleting information critical of the Kremlin at the request of the authorities in Moscow. Facebook criticized the shutdown in Russia. Several independent media outlets had previously been shut down in Russia, including the radio station Echo Moskvy, which is critical of the Kremlin, and the Internet television station Dozhd. Russian President Vladimir Putin also signed several laws further restricting freedom of expression.
The Anonymous collective also reacted to this. During the major hacker attack by the Anonymous collective on March 7th, 2022, the group ensured that the regular program was interrupted and pictures from the war in Ukraine were shown instead. (svw with material from dpa)
