As the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalates, Anonymous affiliates have intensified its attack on Russian cyber infrastructure. The hacker group named the latest attack “Operation Turn Ruzzia Off”.
Newbie hacker group ‘Team OneFist’ along with ‘Anonymous RoughSec’ have “demolished” 316 Metro and Edge routers and disabled another 944 across Russia.
“The operations combined 3 missions to attack Rostelecom and Beeline ISPs with the objective of creating Internet and VoIP phone outages across all of Ruzzia in government buildings, military facilities and Oligarch homes,” Team OneFist tweeted.
“The goal of the attack was to cripple Ruzzian war logistics and slow down the Orc process of reinforcing their army in Ukraine,” the thread continued.
“The cyber warriors of OneFist and RoughSec fought well and demolished or disabled some 1,260 network routers in 48 hours.”
📢 Team OneFist and Anonymous RoughSec announce our first joint-mission in the war against russian genocide! 👊👊 Operation Turn Ruzzia Off successfully demolished 316 Metro and Edge routers across Orcland, and disabled another 944! 🔥🇺🇦 @ZelenskyyUa #OpRussia #Anonymous pic.twitter.com/zvGaVIazfm
— Voltage (@SpoogemanGhost) January 15, 2023
Russia-Ukraine conflict and Team OneFist
Team OneFist’s latest attack comes as Ukraine is conducting rescue operations at the block of flats in Dnipro, where a missile strike killed many.
According to the State Emergency Service, 20 individuals remain missing after the attack on Saturday. The number of confirmed fatalities stands at 44, which includes 5 children. 39 individuals have been pulled from the debris, and the total number of injured is 79, as reported by the service.
The Team OneFist website calls the group “defenders of Ukraine in cyberspace, practitioners of cyber security and open-Source intelligence (OSINT) for the people of Ukraine.”
The group, which started working with the IT Army of Ukraine since the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, has been consistently targeting Russian facilities.
It was noted for its attacks on the uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) facilities of Russian data centres in October 2022, when it claimed to have planted “software bombs” in the systems, which overload and prevent recovery attempts by Moscow’s cybersecurity experts.
Team OneFist that month hit Russia’s Gonets-M satellite network, destroying the CRM/billing databases and effectively silencing the entire network. According to its tweets, the group has caused significant damage to Russia and is considered a threat by Moscow.
Coordinated defence in the Russia-Ukraine conflict
🚨🚨🚨Russia-Ukraine War #Cybertracker Update #21. 19 DEC🚨🚨🚨
This is the complete list of all groups I have tracked since Feb 2022
Reminder this is tracking intent of groups involved#cybersecurity #infosec #RussianUkrainianWar #UkraineRussiaWar #Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/nMMI0e6wBy
— CyberKnow (@Cyberknow20) December 19, 2022
According to CyberKnow, which has been the attack since the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022, have found 117 pro-Ukraine groups and 74 Russian-affiliated groups till now.
“Ukraine has had the largest amount of support, the majority of this was early on in the war — mostly from groups who have now moved to other causes, such as Iran,” the threat intelligence service reported.
“Russia has seen the largest increase of support later in the war.”
Pro-Ukraine groups primarily use Twitter to garner support and spread information on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while Pro-Russian groups and hacktivist groups that support Ukraine primarily use Telegram.