Russian ‘hacktivists’ are causing trouble far beyond Ukraine

On June 20 the attacks againstLithuania began. For the next 10 days, websites belonging to the government and businesses were bombarded by distributed denial of service attacks, overloading them with traffic and forcing them offline. The acting director of Lithuania's national cybersecurity center says that most of the time the attacks are focused on a few targets. This wasn't the same.

Coal and metal were not allowed to be moved throughLithuania to the Russian territory of Kaliningrad in the days before the attacks began. The Telegram channel of the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet has a post aboutLithuania. The group called on hacktivists to attack the website ofLithuania. The targets were shared.

The attacks, Sakrdinskas explains, were continuous and spread across all areas of daily life in Lithuania. In total more than 130 websites in both the public and private sectors were “hindered” or made inaccessible, according to Lithuania’s government. Sakrdinskas says the attacks, which were linked to Killnet, have mostly dropped off since the start of July, and the government has opened a criminal investigation.

Since the start of the war in February, there has been a wave of pro-Russianhacktivist activity. A growing number of countries have been targeted by Killnet for their support of the war in Ukraine. Killnet has been linked to attacks against websites in Germany and Italy. The group has declared war on a number of countries. After a country offers support, it's common for the targeting to happen. XakNet, a pro-Russian hacktivist group, claims to have targeted the Ukrainian government.

Advertisement

The efforts of volunteer hacktivist groups can have an impact without being supported by the state. Ivan Righi, a senior cyberthreat intelligence analyst at Digital Shadows, says that the attackers have malicious intent. They are in support of Russia.

Killnet was first seen in January this year. They were advertising that you could hire a botnet and use it to launch a distributed denial of service attack. The group shifted when Russia invaded Ukraine. The majority of Killnet's efforts and those of its "legion" group, which are members of the public who are asked to join and launch attacks, have been distributed denial of service attacks.

The Telegram channel was created at the end of February and has grown in popularity, with the number of members doubling since May. The public in Russia liked them a lot. Righi sells its own products.

The head of Norway's NSM cybersecurity agency said that while the attacks aren't sophisticated, they will still be able to cause uncertainty in the population and give the impression that we are a piece in the current political situation in Europe.

Russian military hackers have wreaked havoc in the world for years, causing power cuts in Ukraine, hacking the Olympics, and conducting the worst cyberattacks in history. Since the start of the war, there has been a lot of evidence against the Russians. A request for comment from the Russian embassy in the US was not responded to.