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On Thursday, May 10th, the world’s largest hacker group “Anonymous” undertook an online attack on the official website of the Russian diaspora and the International Office for Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo), and a sub-domain was undermined, against the ongoing censorship in the country, especially the recent ban on the use of encrypted IM Telegram.
If you are not familiar with the situation in Russia, let us review the whole story. In April this year, the Russian Federal Ministry of Communications, the Russian Federal Ministry of Telecommunications, Information Technology and Roskomnadzor filed a lawsuit in a Moscow court to limit the use of Telegram in Russia. Prior to this, Telegram had refused to provide access to user encrypted information to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
The court finally ruled that Telegram must be blocked in the country. To implement the ban, local Internet providers (ISPs) blocked 15.8 million IPs on Amazon and Google’s cloud platform to block access to Telegram.
However, the matter did not end there. On May 3rd, the Russian government introduced new mandatory measures requiring the application download site APK Mirror to remove Telegram, as well as more than 50 virtual private networks (VPNs), web agents and Internet anonymous browsing applications. To further block Telegram.
In the attack last week, a subdomain page of Rossotrudnichestvo was tampered with. Anonymous hacker organization left a provocative message on the page, and a satirical picture:
After this incident occurred, the Russian government quickly responded to the matter. At present, the main website of Rossotrudnichestvo is already online, but the subdomains that have been compromised are still offline.
As the ninth-most popular instant messaging application in the world, Telegram is very popular in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. As of March this year, the total number of its active users has reached 200 million people. In addition, there are a large number of Russian companies relying on Amazon and Google’s cloud platform to conduct business, and this Russian government’s shielding will undoubtedly bring trouble to online banking and retail services.
Although the website that captured Rossotrudnichestvo could not force Russian authorities to terminate the ongoing censorship, the addition of the Anonymous hacking organization is likely to prompt this anti-censorship activity to become more intense.
Source, Image: themoscowtimes
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