Anonymous, Russia and What Being a Hacker Really Means

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with Xira Valdés, a journalist at Spain’s SER national radio network, to talk about Anonymous and its attacks on Russia, basically trying to explain the concept of the hacker, why it has nothing to do with crime, but simply with the use of an advanced area of any technology for certain purposes, and how that area can be used, as in this case, for cyberactivism.

Understanding the meaning of the term hacker is fundamental to understanding the phenomenon. Anonymous hackers are generally tech-savvy people who in their professional life usually work in information technology, feed open source repositories or even participate in companies like HackerOne that allow them to train their skills and search for vulnerabilities in companies in exchange for rewards, but who jump at the opportunity to take part in cyberactivism campaigns.

About three weeks ago, Anonymous posted a tweet declaring war on Russia, saying “it was the right thing to do”, and partly in response to a call from the Ukrainian government for cyber-volunteers around the world.

The question was to what extent a relatively loosely coordinated collective like Anonymous could stand up to the country that has most commonly used the net to spread disinformation and attack its enemies, and the answer is that things are going in Anonymous’ favor: so far in the war, the collective has managed to attack everything from the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to pipeline management companies, the Federal Service for Supervision of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), the gas giant Gazprom, the state news network RT, along with television channels such as Russia 24, Channel One or Moscow 24 to broadcast images of the war and to demand its end. Multiple Russian government services have been affected, and some experts claim not only that “Anonymous has proven to be a very capable group that has penetrated some high-value targets, registries and databases in the Russian Federation”, but that in random samples of 100 Russian databases, ninety-two had been compromised. In a specific attack, the authors of a widely used JavaScript library, node-ipc, pushed a malware update that wipes out the hard drive of any computer with a Russian or Belarusian IP address.

An unprecedented attack on all areas of the digital sphere in Russia, carried out by people with the right skill set and who are happy to put them at the service of certain causes, without the need for much coordination and usually able to organize themselves based on their ability. Either way, it is proving a highly efficient weapon and a phenomenon that needs to be understood and explained in the right way.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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