Anonymous claims hack on Russian drones

This attack is the group's first on the Russian military itself

Hacktivist collective Anonymous claim to have scored another win in their ongoing campaign against the Russian war machine by hacking the company responsible for Russian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and leaking tactics and plans.

The hack is the latest in the cyber war waged by Anonymous since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now into its fourth month. Anonymous have launched DDoS attacks and defaced Russian government websites as well as those belonging to infrastructure companies such as Gazprom, stole data from Rosneft, and hacked individuals and businesses supportive of the Russian government.

The collective also went after Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for censorship of the information reaching the eyes and ears of Russian citizens, leaking more than 350,000 files in March this year.

Their most notable attack to date had been on Russian state TV, which they hacked with a video showing the horrors being perpetrated in Ukraine.

This attack is the group's first on the Russian military itself. The hack was announced on Twitter by a hacker called @Spid3r, with the words:

"We hope this information will help the war to end as soon as possible. No war is justified!"

The hacked information, of which partial images were attached to the tweet, included a list of companies involved in UAV manufacture and information relating specifically to the Orion-E attack drone.

The same hacker has detailed attacks on various Belarusian targets including state ministries, banks and other public authorities and shared data about the interests of thousands of Russian businesspeople.

Whether this latest tranche of attacks is likely to bring about the declared aim of the Anonymous collective to hasten the end of the war is, at best, debatable. The nature of Anonymous makes it impossible to ascertain if the hacked data is genuine, although cybersecurity experts do think that most of the collective claims of successful attacks are true. Furthermore, the sharing of the data on public forums makes the data less useful to the Ukrainian military and its allies.