Though a flood of claims by hacking groups followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one study shows most made by Anonymous check out.
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More than three weeks ago, a popular Twitter account named “Anonymous” declared that the shadowy activist group was waging a “cyber war” against Russia.
Since then, the account — which has more than 7.9 million followers, with some 500,000 gained since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — has claimed responsibility for disabling prominent Russian government, news and corporate websites and leaking data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for censoring Russian media.
But is any of that true?
It appears it is, says Jeremiah Fowler, a co-founder of the cybersecurity company Security Discovery, who worked with researchers at the web company Website Planet to attempt to verify the group’s claims.
“Anonymous has proven to be a very capable group that has penetrated some high value targets, records and databases in the Russian Federation,” he wrote in a report summarizing the findings.
Of 100 Russian databases that were analyzed, 92 had been compromised, said Fowler.
They belonged to retailers, Russian internet providers and intergovernmental websites, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, an organization made up of Russia and other former Soviet nations that was created in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Many CIS files were erased,...
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