(full update with background, context)
MOSCOW, February 26 (Reuters) – The official website of the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office, kremlin.ru, was closed on Saturday following reports of denial of service (DDoS) attacks on several other Russian government and state media . websites.
Last week, Britain and the United States said Russian military hackers were behind DDoS attacks that knocked Ukrainian banking and government websites offline before the Russian invasion.
Saturday’s outage of the Kremlin website comes amid increasingly insistent online calls to arms from members of the hacktivist community, which includes Twitter accounts historically linked to Anonymous, the amorphous online activist community that first caught global attention nearly a decade ago. Was.
Russia-themed leaks and hacks attributed to the group have begun to spread across the web – although as is often the case with Anonymous and other hacker collectives, the authenticity of the claims is difficult to establish.
It is not uncommon for independent or ideologically motivated hackers to jump into global conflicts on one side or another; Similar actions took place during the Arab Spring Rebellion.
Sometimes, conflict court sides attract the attention of hacktivists; On Thursday, Reuters reported that the Ukrainian government had made a call to underground hackers to help support its Dalit effort to repel the Russians.
A newly discovered piece of destructive software was circulating in Ukraine on Wednesday, affecting hundreds of computers, according to researchers at cybersecurity firm ESET.
Russia was suspected, which has been repeatedly accused of hacking against Ukraine and other countries. The victims include government agencies and a financial institution, as previously reported by Reuters.
Russia has denied the allegations. (Reporting by Andrew Osborne; Additional reporting by Raphael Satter and James Pearson; Writing by Olzas Ouezov; Editing by Diane Craft)
