Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) claimed on July 16 that it had hacked nearly 100 Russian websites that support the Kremlin's war effort, taking them offline and replacing their homepages with a picture of a bloody pig's head.
The intelligence agency said the operation was carried out on July 15 with the help of "the volunteer hacker community."
"The cyberattack was aimed at destroying internal information of companies that serve Russian public sector clients involved in the war against Ukraine," it said in a post on Telegram.
HUR said the targeted companies included MITgroup, a "group of companies engaged in the development of corporate websites," United Crane Technologies, a "trade and production company for the manufacture and sale of lifting equipment," and RUMOS-LADA, a Lada car dealership.
"As a result of the cyberattack, the appearance of the affected web resources of the aggressor has undergone certain changes — now, instead of the usual sections for Russians, only a pig's head and the error code '404' are visible on the sites," the agency said.
HUR has reportedly carried out several cyberattacks in recent months.
A large-scale cyberattack in late June left at least 250,000 consumers in occupied Crimea and other Russian-controlled territories without communication, a military intelligence source told the Kyiv Independent.
The attack in June reportedly affected both the networks of consumers and the networks of operators that used the impacted infrastructure on Russian-occupied territories. Representatives of Russian providers called it "the most powerful DDoS attack they have ever experienced," the HUR said.
The Kyiv Independent could not verify these claims.
Sonya Bandouil
(Updated: )
