Notorious hacking collective Anonymous warned a list of companies that are still operating in Russia, to pull out by the end of today, or face dire consequences.
As the invasion ordered by president Vladimir Putin rages on, Anonymous posted the warning to Twitter on 21 March, along with an image showing the logos of companies that are allegedly still profiting by conducting business in Russia, including well-known names such as Oreo, Nestle, Otis, Subway, Papa John's, Burger King and Chevron.
Since the start of the invasion, many corporate giants have ended operations in Russia, including ExxonMobil, Harley-Davidson, General Motors, Volvo and Daimler, Shell, BP, Apple, Equinor, Starbucks and McDonalds.
Anonymous issued the threat through its Twitter account, saying:
“We call on all companies that continue to operate in Russia by paying taxes to the budget of the Kremlin’s criminal regime: Pull out of Russia! We give you 48 hours to reflect and withdraw from Russia or else you will be under our target!”
Declaring war
The hacking group officially declared cyber warfare against Russia soon after it invaded Ukraine, and has already claimed a slew of attacks against Russian targets, including disrupting live feeds of Russian state-sponsored news programmes to broadcast pro-Ukraine messages and show footage of cities being bombed, and other devastation caused by the invasion.
In addition, Anonymous has used DDoS techniques to target a range of Russian media outlets and government websites, and claims to have shut down Russia's space agency so Putin no longer has any control over "spy satellites".
Other incidents include the theft and publication of Russian Department of Defence data, which could embarrass Russia, and possibly help Ukraine’s fighters.
“putin_stop_this_war”
Jeremiah Fowler, co-founder of cyber security company Security Discovery, said in an interview with CNBC that a large portion of the attacks claimed appear to be real, such as those on state-sponsored news networks.
“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, in conjunction with people from Website Planet, analysed 100 online databases that belong to retailers, Russian internet providers, and inter-governmental websites, and discovered that a staggering 92 of them had been compromised.
A lot of the attacks left behind evidence of pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin sentiment, and planted malware that deleted files and randomly renamed others to names like “putin_stop_this_war”.
Anonymous says the 40 or so organisations on its list can expect similar treatment if they don’t respond to the group’s demands and stop operating in Russia within 48 hours.
However, two of the companies listed, oil giants Halliburton and Schlumberger, suspended their Russian operations before Anonymous tweeted the threat. Similarly, Bridgestone Tires, which was also on the list, already announced it would suspend all operations in Russia from 18 March.
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