Week 3: Hacktivist groups continue cyber-war with Russia

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“Among the sampling of cloud storage databases, we discovered a very large number of secret keys and referenced mail.ru, one of the biggest email providers in Russia as the host server.” 

Other databases contained security information, internal passwords and a “very large number” of secret keys, which unlocked encrypted data.

“My partner at Security Discovery, Bob Diachenko, actually captured a state news live feed from a website and filmed the screen, so we were able to validate that they had hacked at least one live feed [with] a pro-Ukrainian message in Russian.” Fowler added.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to disable websites by flooding them with traffic. These are an easy effective way to shut down a site. And many Russian sites are experiencing constant DoS hack attacks. Many Russian affiliated websites have been knocked offline at various points since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

A new kind of war

Marianne Bailey, a cybersecurity partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse and former cybersecurity executive with the U.S. National Security Agency. Cyber activism is a low-cost way for them to influence governmental and corporate actions, she said.