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awb

Anonymous is supposedly joining the cyber war:

https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/1496954233492541444

https://twitter.com/YourAnonOne/status/1496965766435926039

They are claiming responsibility for taking down RT.com and some other Russian sites.

View on HN

RT.com is still up and running.

A DDoS attack is hardly a ‘complex’ attack against Russia and is easily mitigated against these days vs a malware wiper already spreading all over Ukraine. A DDoS is not even remotely considered a ‘hack’.

Anonymous is not exactly sophisticated like the ‘Equation Group’ and these sort of DDoS + shodan.io lookups are what script-kiddie jokers do. They have nothing to fight with compared to Russia.

Ukraine needs higher calibre cyber security teams to defend itself, not predictable script kiddie DDoSers.

rt.com seems down from my perspective

DDoSes are simple tools, but they can be extremely effective at stopping Russian propaganda mills.

I am not familiar with RT, what "propaganda" were they spreading? I've known of "rt.com" for a while, seeing it posted occasionally, and it never was anything that gave me pause (didn't even known it stood for Russia Today until today).

Russia Today is a state-owned and controlled media company that directly takes content directions from Russia's government.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/how-the-truth... has a good overview of how exactly it works.

Yea it is a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at western readers. It sometimes even has good reporting but everything is curated to serve the kremlins interests.

> Yea it is a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at western readers.

Good thing to note, have neve read an article from them and chances are I won't in the future so it will probably not have much direct impact.

RT is a well-known Russian propaganda operation. The fact that your response to it was "it never was anything that gave me pause" is a sign that you did not detect the propaganda and that it may have been working on you.

> is a sign that you did not detect the propaganda and that it may have been working on you

Could be, or not considering I've never read an article from them and couldn't name a single headline (which is why I asked the question)

Meh! RT is no different from BBC or Al Jazeera or any other state media. They will have more balanced take on most news compared to any corporate propaganda outlets like CNN or Fox.

The state news agencies are only problematic as sources when they are writing about their own government or immediate enemies... in that they will tend to prefer publishing what their leaders are saying vs what the enemy is saying about them.

Yes, more comparably to the BBC. The only one unique enough to have a royal charter to be the state broadcaster in the UK. They will defend the interests of the country that they are operating in.

So the next time a giant scandal about Anonymous's secrets is uncovered or if the BBC airs something that Anonymous doesn't like in the UK, maybe they will run a DDoSing tool against them?

Whenever I see RT mentioned, it's always called a "sophisticated propaganda operation" (or something along those lines), and I must say I can't help but physically cringe.

Almost as if every other news network and media company is not a propaganda operation meant to serve interests, and RT is the odd one out.

I always find it interesting how when western countries have state-owned media (like BBC) they're considered normal media networks, but when Russia, or another non-NATO western-aligned country has state-owned media it's "a propaganda operation".

They're pretty interesting because they have an incentive to be reliable in order for people to trust them. They are also generous with appearance fees so they gets lots of famous Americans on the screen Larry King, Glenn Beck and Ron Paul come to mind. Funny, when googling for examples of Americans appearing on RT a couple of Quora posts came up that may illustrate RT's angle:

> Why does RT (Russia Today) claim that Americans are forced to use unsanitary public laundromats because federal law prohibits hanging clothes on clotheslines to dry?

> The TV show "Russia Today" said the USA is collapsing because of the super rich. Is this true or not true?

It seems to me RT does not necessarily lie to its viewers, it just never skips a chance to make America look bad. Many more examples in the article, "Russia Goes Viral: How the RT network built a US audience":

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/09/how-the-rt-network-b...

> they have an incentive to be reliable in order for people to trust them

Classic social engineering trick, gain trust and "cash out" later.

certainly !

To quote https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB

"The purpose of Russia Today is to make sure you have no idea what’s actually happening in Russia today."

Yesterday they were describing how Ukraine is shelling around Russian schools…

Did that actually happen? It very well could be true even if the framing is inappropriate (Russians could be stationed around schools, for example).

I just typed it in on many web browsers, tor, VPNs etc and it turns out that RT.com is still up.

So it’s mission failed successfully?

It was down earlier today for an hour or more.

It appears just to be a leaseweb server.

Rt is down for me

there are /some/ intricacies to DDoS, it's not all just "build a botnet and send packets". DNS amplification[1] is a good example of a non-straightforward augment, and there are all sorts of funny ideas people have that make it difficult to mitigate a dedicated attacker. the issue is that it's mostly (s)kids renting out botnets and spamming video game servers with layer3 packets.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-amplification-d...

isn't anonymous just a loose affiliation of people on 4chan though? Kind of strange to claim that the whole collective is doing something.

And even then it’s mostly a bunch of kids larping

That's all it ever was

4chan is so big these days, a mere board like /pol/ will have 30 million unique IP visits per month, that is (perhaps unfortunately) more than just kids these days. It's the main free speech board of the internet, it draws people from all over the world.

It’s nowhere near that big.

The "real" Anonymous was. Now some other hacktivist group uses the name to cash in on the clout. People get really excited when they hear Anonymous is back at work.

That's where it started, but they're entirely separate banners now.

It is actually not allowed to organize raids or other Anonymous-style hacktivities that are against US law on 4chan. So, calling for cyber war may just net you a warning from moderators. The board is not the bastion of absolute unregulated free speech people think it is!

More broadly, outside of the current geopolitical context, trying to pick a target and rally anons against it is in bad taste. If you try, you may be told that "4chan is Not Your Personal Army" (NYPA).

As a result, the various "Anonymous" groups really don't have a home there.

When I didn't know better I thought them as some kind anarcho libetarian group, but behind every effective cyber offensive there is always a powerful actor.. mostly a state or private interest.

Not necessarily 4chan, but yes. Its name can and has been claimed by different groups.

Any time someone refers to Anonymous as if they are actually some kind of cohesive group it's a clear indicator they have no idea what they are talking about.

  While this account cannot claim to speak for the whole of the Anonymous collective

Anonymous would never say that :)

How has no one on HN called out the Anonymous drivel yet. Even bringing 4chan supposedly into it. No one has any idea what they’re talking about.

RT's app is down at the moment. I'm in Spain

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