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KEY POINTS
- A hacker group named CH01 breached 32 Russian websites Friday
- The websites played a video of the Kremlin burning instead of displaying their usual content
- The video featured a song by Kino, a Russian rock band known for their freedom-themed lyrics
A hacker group declared a cyber war against Russia as it defaced dozens of websites on the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.
The group, which goes by the name CH01, hacked at least 32 Russian websites Friday, TechCrunch reported.
CH01 replaced the sites’ content with a video of the Kremlin in Moscow on fire, according to the outlet.
Soviet-era rock band Kino’s “A Song Without Words” also played in the background of the video, which featured QR codes for what appeared to be CH01’s Telegram channel.
“Hacker group CH01 is in solidarity with the entire civilized world, in order to restore justice and the triumph of the forces of light and goodness,” one of the newly created channel’s posts read, according to a machine translation.
“[O]n the anniversary of the terrorist invasion of dictatorial Russia into a strong and independent Ukraine, we declare cyber war on dictatorship and totalitarianism and the idiocy of [Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s] criminal regime,” it continued.
CH01’s breach reportedly affected websites for a bakery, a company that distributes farming products, a restaurant and a recording studio, among others.
Kino was one of Russia’s most popular rock bands in the 1980s, and their lyrics often included themes of freedom, according to TechCrunch.
In a similar story, a Ukrainian hacker group claimed responsibility for taking down the online streams of Putin’s state of the nation address from last week.
The website of the government-owned All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) was inaccessible for some time during the speech delivered before the Russian parliament.
Attempts to open the VGTRK’s website during the affected periods revealed the message “Technical work is underway,” Russian state media agency TASS reported.
The outage was the result of a distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack, according to the Russian government-owned RIA Novosti news outlet.
Ukrainian volunteer hacker group IT Army of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the outage.
“Great job! We launched a DDoS attack on channels showing Putin’s address to the federal assembly,” the group said in a Twitter post.
Another hacking group claiming to be working for jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has stepped forward and taken responsibility for the attack as well.
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