More Exploits of Anonymous.
The group hacks and defaces Russian Space Research Institute Website.
It is an all-out war now. No opportunity to harm the interests of one another is left to chance. Everyone hears about attacks and catastrophes on the ground. And there are just as many on the cyber surface.
A prominent but loosely connected group—that goes by the name of Anonymous—has just added another bow to their victories. On March 3, the group hacked the website of Russian Space Research Institute (IKI), defaced it and leaked files that belonged to Russian space agency Roscosmos. As the Russian-Ukraine crisis continues, there has been a sudden increase in hacktivism targeting Russian installations. cyber attacks on Russian interests.
The hackers claiming responsibility of the attack called themselves ‘vog3lsec’ and they are affiliated with the prominent Anonymous group. The message was posted on one subdomain of IKI’s website which is still offline, whereas as other subdomains like the one related to Department of Optical and Physical Research is active and accessible. .
The group posted files drawn from Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. These files include forms, pdf’s, and spreadsheets in both English and Russian. The content of these files dealt with lunar missions, as confirmed by ‘Motherboard’ that reviewed the data.
The hackers disclosed in a chat with ‘Motherboard’ that “they were using their own file sharing service where the files could be accessed only by providing a username and password…all I did was bruteforcing the password while keeping the username as admin… as they were using weak password, it didn’t take much time for me to get the password.”
The leaked data reveals discussion on possible lunar landing site on the moon’s south pole. This may not be significant achievement on the part of hackers because Russians have already announced proposed lunar landing sites. Motherboard could not ascertain the verity of these claims. And IKI also did not respond to requests for a comment.
A few days later, there was another claim from a group suggesting that they targeted ‘Vehicle Monitoring System.’ This time, however, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin came out with an immediate rebuttal that any of the Russian satellite control centres were hacked. He told Interfax, “Offlining satellites of any country is actually a casus belli—a cause for war.” Researchers checked and confirmed that the new website does not show any signs that the space satellites were hacked.
When the iki website (url:uv.ikiweb. ru) was inaccessible, its archived version carried a message posted by the hackers and obviously directed towards the Russian officials. The language was profane and derogatory, to say the least; and it mentioned ISS at the end referring probably to Chief Ragozin’s earlier remark that he had made about the partnership between Russian space program and NASA. He appeared to imply that the cooperation between the two space agencies could come to an end.
The breach at Roscosmos came only days after another hacker going by the name of NB65 claimed that he had shut down Russian satellite control systems. NB65 was also Anonymous-linked. Besides this another hacking group, operating under the guise of ‘AgainstTheWest’ claimed to have infiltrated the Rosatom nuclear energy entity. Yet another group, operating under the name of Anonymous Liberland released a large cache of data stolen from a Belarusian defense contractor. The claims, which could not be verified, were all denied by Rozogin.
In the midst of these claims and denials, the head of Russia’s space agency warned that his corporation will eventually identify and apprehend these hackers and hand them over to Russian Security Agencies who would initiate criminal investigation against them and bring them to justice.