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Anonymous Just Hacked Russia’s Central Bank
The group promised to “release 35,000 files with secret agreements in 48 hours”
Anonymous, the international hacker group, recently declared war on Putin.
So far, they’ve done some damage. They DDoS’ed Russia Today, a major TV channel. They briefly hacked two of Russia’s biggest state-controlled TV channels to show support-for-Ukraine content (video here.)
The hack lasted for all of 12 minutes. Yet, millions of Russians saw the pillars of their media, hacked by outside forces.
Today, Anonymous claimed on Twitter that it has hacked Russia’s Central Bank. They also promised to release sensitive documents in the next two days.
How effective is Anonymous’ war against Russia?
People are saying that the war in Ukraine is a lot less cyber-oriented than was expected. That is simply not true.
There may not have been an increase in the number of direct cyber-attacks against Ukraine since the invasion. But the warfare is real. And it’s happening mostly on TikTok.
Yes, TikTok. Ukraine-related content has amassed a whopping 30.5 billion views in the first few weeks of the invasion on the platform. For comparison, that’s about the sum of 10 most popular pop songs’ all-time views on Youtube.
What are people posting on TikTok? Short clips of their daily lives. Some get a glimpse of a Russian tank shooting a target down the street. Others record missiles as they explode. Everyone with a smartphone is a reporter.
However, not everyone is unbiased. People have been caught posting snippets of video games, portraying them as actual war footage. Likewise, real footage has been discredited as fake by Russian propaganda, which is plentiful on the platform.