The horror of the war of aggression that Vladimir Putin is waging against Ukraine is real.

But the fight is also fought with digital means.

In this, the international hacker collective Anonymous has positioned itself clearly and last Thursday evening declared the cyber war on the Russian government via Twitter: "The Anonymous collective is officially in cyber war against the Russian government."

Earlier, the government of Ukraine approached Ukrainian hackers and asked them to volunteer in the country's cyber defense.

But recent actions by Anonymous go beyond protecting Ukraine's digital infrastructure and espionage contracts.

They are aimed at the communication of Russian authorities.

Attacks on RT and Gazprom

Several Russian government websites, such as those of the Kremlin, the government and the Ministry of Defense, were no longer accessible over the weekend.

The sites were still unavailable on Monday.

The reason for this is probably an excessive number of artificially controlled access attempts, so-called DDoS attacks, which lead to overloading and the collapse of the website.

Anonymous published email data from employees of various ministries on Twitter.

However, the message was soon deleted, presumably at the instigation of Twitter itself.

The hacker group reports a number of other attacks on media such as Russia Today, various banks and the energy company Gazprom, disrupting television programs, the gas supply of a telecommunications company and even interfering with military communications.

Whether Anonymous is actually behind all this cannot be confirmed.

Furthermore, on Saturday the collective published internal documents of the Belarusian arms manufacturer Tetraedr, which is said to be close to Putin.

On Monday night, Anonymous justified the fight as a commitment to those oppressed by Putin.

No one deserves to be mugged at the whim of a madman, or to live under censorship and not be able to tell the truth to those in power.

The hacker group with the identifying mark of the white Guy Fawkes mask sees itself as an international association of anonymous private individuals who stand up for freedom of expression on the Internet.

Their communication takes place in encrypted chats and social media.

There the “hacktivists” make their actions public.

The fact that the collective works in a decentralized manner and without a clear hierarchy makes it difficult to verify the user accounts that belong to Anonymous.

The actions of Anonymous are likely to come across the Russian security authorities because their secret services are considered to be extremely digitally savvy.

Especially since the Crimean invasion in 2014, many of the cyber attacks on Ukrainian computers and websites have been traced back to Russian secret services.

Even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Internet disruptions increased, especially on Ukrainian government websites, and the HermeticWiper malware was also found on hundreds of computers.

There was also a reaction to the current attacks by Anonymous: From Saturday morning, access to Twitter was partially blocked for Russian users, and then from Sunday also to Facebook.

The Russian hacker group Conti announced counterattacks in the event of military attacks on the Russian infrastructure.

It was announced on Monday that the Facebook accounts of well-known people in Ukraine had been hacked.

In this "cyber war", which the invasion of Ukraine also represents, no one has yet gained the upper hand.