Kremlin Website Down, Russian TV Channels Hijacked As Anonymous Wages Cyber War On 'Dictator' Putin

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its third day, the official website of the Kremlin, kremlin.ru, went down on Saturday amid reports of denial of service (DDoS) attacks on various other Russian government and state media websites.

The outage followed Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov's announcement that the country had launched an “IT army” to combat Russia in cyberspace.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that researchers at the cybersecurity firm ESET discovered a new piece of destructive software circulating in Ukraine, noting the technology was responsible for hitting hundreds of computers, impacting several government agencies and a financial institution.

Suspicion fell on Russia, which faced repeated hacking accusations against Ukraine and other countries. Accordingly, Britain and the United States last week claimed that Russian military hackers were behind a spate of DDoS attacks that briefly knocked Ukrainian banking and government websites offline before the Russian invasion.

Meanwhile, Russia opted to distance itself from the allegations.

Many Twitter accounts historically associated with Anonymous, the amorphous online activist community, have since laid down plans to take aim at Russia's online presence.

“Faced with this series of attacks that Ukraine has been suffering from the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, we could not help but support the Ukrainian people,” the collective said in a tweet per Yahoo! Finance. At the start of the conflict, Anonymous said it would launch a “cyberwar against the Russian government.”

It also previously tweeted that, “#Anonymous is at war with Russia. Stay tuned.”

The latest move comes after its Twitter account declared on Thursday that the group was “currently involved in operations against the Russian Federation.” The same day, the Ukrainian government had put out a call to the hacker underground to help support its effort to ward off further Russian attacks in cyberspace.

The office of Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied claims that Anonymous is behind the cyberattacks as people uploaded videos showing several channels playing Ukrainian music and displaying images of its flag and other nationalistic symbols.

As for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that their armed forces had “derailed” the dictator's plans to capture Kyiv, according to the Independent.