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Think Like an Attacker: Understanding Cybercriminals & Nation-State Threat Actor
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Threat Intelligence

5 MIN READ

News



RUSSIAN HACKTIVISM: FLASHY NON-EVENTS OR SERIOUS THREAT?

While it's tempting to dismiss Russian hacktivist DDoSing as all sizzle and no
steak, experts warn the cyberattacks can cause serious damage -- and are poised
to become more and more dangerous
Nate Nelson
Contributing Writer, Dark Reading
October 04, 2023
Source: vchal via Alamy Stock Photo
PDF


Though sometimes they appear to be all bark and no bite, experts say Russian
hacktivist groups are in fact having a serious impact on organizations in
Ukraine and NATO countries.



Pro-Russian hacktivism has exploded since the beginning of the Ukraine war. Led
by the now-infamous KillNet, nationalist hackers have been orchestrating attacks
against any government or corporation voicing opposition to Putin's invasion.

Many of them are empty PR stunts — for example, KillNet's takedown of the UK
royal family's official website on Sunday — harking back to the days of
Anonymous. But experts warn that not only are these groups doing actual harm,
they're also planning bigger and badder things to come.

"Some are nuisance attacks on public-facing websites that just kind of make a
statement," says Michael McPherson, a 24-year FBI veteran, now senior vice
president of technical operations at ReliaQuest. "But you see them also target
critical infrastructure like hospital systems, which is much more significant,
and much more impactful."




THE LANDSCAPE OF RUSSIAN HACKTIVIST GROUPS

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has played a distinct role in
the past decade's Russia-Ukraine conflict, including in the latest invasion.
"DDoS is what kicked the whole thing off, right?" points out Richard Hummel,
senior threat intelligence lead at Netscout. "That's the first thing that hit
the media, government, and financial organizations in Ukraine before Russia
invaded."



As the war went on, the buck seemed to pass from known state-sponsored groups to
hacktivist outfits. However, McPherson cautions, "the lines are blurring, and
attribution is much more challenging than it has been in the past."

Whoever they are or are affiliated with, these groups will target any
organizations or individuals who speak out against the war. For example,
"President Biden speaks at the G7 summit — the number one spike in DDoS attacks
for that day is against the United States government," Hummel explains.



Since then, there has been a noticeable evolution in the organization,
capabilities, and methods of the groups performing such attacks.

"KillNet comes out and they're legion-strong," Hummel says. "And then they start
to fracture and splinter into different subcomponents, so you've got multiple
factions of KillNet supporting different agendas, and different facets of the
government. Then you have DDoSia, you have Anonymous Sudan, which we firmly
believe is part of KillNet, and you have NoName. So you've got all these sort of
splinter cells."

It's part of the reason for the recent explosion of DDoS activity around the
world. In H1 2023 alone, Netscout recorded nearly 7.9 million DDoS attacks —
around 44,000 a day, a 31% growth year-over-year.


RUSSIAN HACKTIVISTS' EVOLVING TACTICS

DDoS-focused groups are not only more active today than ever, says Pascal
Geenens, director of threat intelligence at Radware, they're also more
sophisticated.

"When the war started back in February 2022, and these new threat actors came to
the scene, they were inexperienced. They were not well organized. And now after
more than a year-and-a-half of building experience — these people did nothing
else, every day, for the last 18 months, you can imagine they became better at
what they're doing," he says.

Geenens cites NoName, a group Radware covered extensively in its H1 2023 Global
Threat Analysis Report, as a good example of a matured hacktivist threat. Where
typical DDoS attacks involve simply overloading a target site with garbage
traffic, NoName has adopted a different approach.

About a year ago, he explains, the group started employing tools for analyzing
Web traffic to targeted websites, "something that sits in the middle of your
browser and the website, and records all the variables and all the information
that gets passed between. So what they do is: they find the pages that are most
impactful for the backend of that website, for example, a feedback form that
somebody can fill in, or a page where you have a search box. And they will
submit legitimate requests to those forms."

This more directed approach enables the group to do more with less. "Anonymous
Sudan is doing 2-3 million requests per second. That's not what you're gonna see
from NoName. NoName might come at you with 100,000 to 150,000 requests per
second, but they are so narrowed down to those things that impact backend
infrastructure that they bring down a lot of sites," Geenens says.

Whether it's NoName's more sophisticated tactics or Anonymous Sudan's sheer
volume of traffic, hacktivist groups are proving themselves able to affect large
and important organizations in sometimes meaningful ways.


HACKTIVISTS' AMBITIONS ARE GROWING

"In the beginning of the war, there were a lot of government, hospital, and
travel websites, but there was no real impact on the business itself — it was
just a website that was down. Now I see them targeting ticketing services for
public transport, payment applications, and even third-party APIs that are used
by many other applications, and causing more impact," Geenens says. As just one
of many recent examples, last month, a NoName attack against Canada's Border
Services Agency caused significant delays at border checkpoints throughout the
country.

Evidence suggests groups like NoName and KillNet will continue to mix empty PR
grabs with meaningful attacks, but they may go even further still. Geenens
points out how KillNet's leader, KillMilk, has expressed interest in
incorporating wipers into the group's attacks.

"He even started an idea," Geenens warns, "where he wanted to create a
paramilitary cyber army — a little bit modeled after the Wagner Group, which is
a physical army, but he wants to do that for cyber. So building that influence
and building a cyber army that will work for the highest bidder and perform
destructive cyber attacks."

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