back to article Anonymous takes the Kremlin offline in Putin protest

Hacktivist group Anonymous has been up to its old tricks again, this time briefly taking out the web site of the Russian president as a show of support for the growing opposition to newly re-crowned leader Vladimr Putin. Like most of the group's DDoS campaigns, the attack only temporarily disrupted the kremlin.ru site, which …

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  1. Winkypop Silver badge
    Flame

    Not that many years ago...

    ...such an 'incident' could have set off WW3.

    Times have changed, if not power-hungry politicians.

  2. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Anonymous take out the Kremlin

    Three days later, the KGB/SVR take out Anonymous...

    1. h4rm0ny

      Re: Anonymous take out the Kremlin

      "Three days later, the KGB/SVR take out Anonymous..."

      Right. Because the Russian's have the ability to send hit squads barging into hundreds or thousands of family homes across the USA and Europe.

      1. Usually Right or Wrong

        Re: Anonymous take out the Kremlin

        Right. Because the idiots will have left their IP addresses all over the place, as they usually do. maybe not three days, but sometime in the future, in the spirit of cooperation, police in European countries and other places will go knocking on doors.

        1. Danny 14

          Re: Anonymous take out the Kremlin

          indeed and in a true western democratic society old grandma flo will be rendered to the US 'cause she had a rootkit installed on her "not quite up to date pc" along with all her other zombie infested PC friends.

        2. AnonymousNow

          Very dubious claim you are making.

          Yes, exactly like the Russians who are quick to prosecute internet fraud and scare ware fraud when the perps are Russians and the victims are everyone else. Don't know which countries would help the Ruskies on this or why in the heck anyone would. Very dubious claim you are making.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Anonymous take out the Kremlin

        @H4rm0ny - Yes, the Russian secret service have murdered people in the UK in the last few years - there was the guy who was poisoned with Polonium. I'm not suggesting that Anonymous are this far up the hit list, but it is possible...

    2. mjwalshe

      Re: Anonymous take out the Kremlin

      Well id certainly be carefull about accepting any cups of tea :-)

  3. Eugene Crosser
    Coat

    > At the moment we can’t establish who’s behind the attack.

    -- fair enough, they are anonymous, aren't they?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why do people care about these stories? Taking down a brochureware site for an hour is so meaningless. I'd find it more impressive if they'd organised a letter writing campaign.

  5. DrXym

    Why are these attacks worthy of news coverage?

    Some anonymous people don't like entity X and ddos it. Next week some anonymous people won't like entity Y and ddos it. Repeat ad nauseum for years with randomly chosen targets. How many anonymous people are there, do they overlap, are they representative, are they doing it for the lulz or strong convictions? No one knows, no one really cares. Defacing a website and denial of service is akin to defacing a poster. The long term effect of these acts is zero.

    This sort of vandalism needs to be seen in the context of that. The headline may as well say "website vulnerable to ddos is attacked by vandals" over and over because that's all these stories amount regardless of the website in question.

    1. h4rm0ny

      Re: Why are these attacks worthy of news coverage?

      I'd wager there are several more in the IT community who are now aware of Bahrain's terrible human rights abuses following Anonymous' targetting of the F1 championships being held there. Similarly, although I'm fairly familiar with what is going on in Russian politics at the moment, there are probably a fair few that are now becoming aware of the growing discontent in Russia right now because of this. Anonymous' attacks do raise awareness sometimes. And it's interesting because if the US or European authorities *could* shut down Anonymous, they almost certainly would. Which suggests they aren't having much luck. So the continued activities of Anonymous are a commentary on enforcement ability as well which I find interesting.

      Anonymous will fragment, Anonymous will go through cycles. Some will get caught and prosecuted, some will drop out, but others will think: "this is good, I want to do this" and become Anonymous and carry on. I think Anonymous is going to be with us for some time.

      1. mark 63 Silver badge

        IT community

        several ? yeah a few maybe

        Has anyone outside of the IT community heard of anonymous?

        ok they hit the headlines once or twice but now that they are old news, the public has forgotten .

        Whithin the IT only reg readers, and I have friends in IT who havent heard of the Reg !

        (they are berated for it)

      2. DrXym

        Re: Why are these attacks worthy of news coverage?

        There was copious news reportage of Bahrain and Russian politics prior to this attack which amounts to little more than a blip really. If people are not aware of the political situations before and only became aware through an attack then clearly they have no interest in the news or the politics in the first place. So what exactly is the attack bringing to the table? Nothing except for another headline for anonymous before they move onto something else next week.

      3. Nuke
        Flame

        @h4rm0ny

        Wrote :- "several more in the IT community who are now aware of Bahrain's terrible human rights abuses following Anonymous' targetting of the F1 championships being held there"

        More to do with Bahrain drawing attention to themselves by hosting an event like that

        And :- "there are probably a fair few that are now becoming aware of the growing discontent in Russia right now"

        OK, I'm aware of it. Big suprise. Actually, there are billions of people around the world discontent with their governments. Me for a start, and I live in the UK, a democratic, liberal, fair, balanced country where there is no corruption, politicians never lie or take bribes or are influenced by charming and wealthy "personalities"; and what matters is merit, not money, and every decision is made as the result of intelligent informed debate, not soundbites. Oh, wait a minute ......

        What do you know about Russia anyway - live there? I'd rather exert my energies on issues in my own country - there are plenty at close hand. It's not as easy though as sitting, with no risk of face-to-face encounter, pointing to real or supposed issues from a great distance, issues which are not always as they appear or what the media make them appear, sorry.

    2. AnonymousNow

      Re: Why are these attacks worthy of news coverage?

      You are thinking about this the wrong way. Anonymous does DDOS BECAUSE it gains media attention. If it did not, they would simply do something else which does. In which case you would still be confused and saying "why does THIS act gain media attention."

  6. David 66
    Megaphone

    Putin's a wanker.

  7. JDX Gold badge

    Technical question

    [How] Is it possible to prevent/defend against DDOS attacks? You have to 'listen' to the requests to decide to ignore/block them so does that mean a sufficiently powerful attack is undefendable?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Technical question

      Yes, essentially. No matter what DDoS protections you have in place, if they're not using an application-layer attack or whatever and are instead trying to beat you down with sheer volume of packets, the only thing you can really do is wait it out.

    2. DrXym

      Re: Technical question

      Stick your web server behind some hardware such as Cisco Guard which does traffic analysis and starts dropping malicious connections while preserving the legitimate ones. I assume there would be a lot of heuristics involved but the idea would be to identify malicious requests and discard them.

  8. TwoWolves
    Big Brother

    Smoke and Mirrors

    Given that they are in fact anonymous how do we know that this was perpetrated by them and not our own government(s)? Sometimes it seems to me that they have an incongruous collection of targets; I'd advise that we should not believe everything we read.

  9. Brezhnev's Shadow
    Big Brother

    Lordy

    Are they tools of Fox now, or what?

    1. AnonymousNow

      Re: Lordy

      Putin's just bad. This is unrelated to false Faux news allegations. Just because our own democracies are failing does not make Putin any better. Two wrongs make a right now?

  10. TeeCee Gold badge
    Alert

    "...we have the means to resist them."

    Uh-oh. Somehow I'm getting that "diplomatically worded extradition request through channels" is not one of those means......

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Some Anonymous ops seem to pass on unreported, though.

    No news on Anonymous hacking Ricardo B Salinas' site, or them DDoSing Mexican Bank "Banco Azteca" over the Presidential Candidate Debate last week. TV Azteca chose to air a dull footie match at the same time, with the CEO arguing that people would want to watch footie more than the debate.

    End Result: The debate's rating nearly doubled the footie match's rating, and the match ended in a 4-1 defeat for Morelia's team ... which is owned by TV Azteca's holding company. Oh, and Anonymous going on a DDoS spree against all Grupo Salinas companies' sites, hacking a couple of 'em and basically making R.B. Salinas look like an ass.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone could pay dearly

    Some Anon members may end up as dog meat.

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