Russia Today, or RT, the state-run television channel of Russia, ran into a series of issues this week. The website of the TV Channel was seen to be inaccessible for a span of hours between Thursday, February 24 and early on the next day. The TV channel company claimed to be the victim to a cyberattack.
A spokesperson of Russia Today reported in an email on Friday, February 25 after they had received a statement by Anonymous. They specified in the email that Russia Today’s website was subjected to massive DDoS attacks. The attacks came from around hundred million devices, most of which they suspected to be from the United States. They remarked that the attack could cause a temporary block in access to the website for certain users. Russia Today had been working towards resolving these issues since then.
The abbreviation of the phenomenon of Distributed Denial of Service is DDoS. It refers to an attack where hackers direct bogus traffic in an overwhelming intensity. This is done to a website targeted with the agenda of overloading it and finally rendering it inaccessible. Sources are still not clear as which ‘Anonymous’ statement the TV channel was exactly referring to.
A Twitter account purporting to represent Anonymous wrote on Thursday that “The #Anonymous collective has taken down the website of the #Russian propaganda station RT News.”
Source: Daily Mail UK
All this while, ‘Anonymous’ has always come forward as a somewhat undefined, nebulous group, hence its name. It has always been in the possession of numerous accounts on the social media platform, Twitter. They stand to speak for a group, claiming their word on Twitter applies to the entire group. However, there is still no way to know whether they were indeed, the group responsible for the website to go down.
When the spokesperson wrote the mail to the concerned reporters, the Russia Today website was back to functioning. A loading screen on the RT.com site indicated that they had put up a DDoS protection firm. This was in order to screen the visitors on site and protect it against any further bogus traffic.
The series of DDoS in the recent past have been relatively high. But the attacks on the website of Russia Today has been by far the most prominent. About a few weeks ago in mid-February, the United States and the Ukrainian government accused Russia for initiating a cyberattack. Russian government was blamed for taking down the websites of the Ukrainian government and two Ukrainian banks. Russia had denied these claims later on.
