Anonymous leaks ‘776GB of Kremlin files’ after claimed hack of Russia’s Ministry of Culture

ANONYMOUS has obtained and published a massive trove of Russian files.

The vigilante hacker group is making good on a vow to infiltrate and disrupt the Russian war effort.

Anonymous is a leaderless collective that uses internet sleuthing and hacking techniques to obtain confidential informationReuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin first provoked Ukraine when he overtook a large section of their land in 2014AFP

Anonymous breached government institutions and Russian companies in the cyber attack.

Their data dump includes over 200,000 emails from the Russian Ministry of Culture, which has oversight over censorship, archives and art.

They also hijacked emails and data from a state-backed oil and gas company called Aerogas.

News of the hack was widely broken by an Anonymous-focused Twitter account.

Anonymous published their findings on DDoSecrets – a whistleblowing platform that many view as the new Wikileaks.

DDoSecrets publishes datasets with information considered to be worthy of public interest – in the past, they’ve released datasets that reveal political corruption and two-faced lobbying.

The site’s Latin slogan, Veritatem cognoscere ruat cælum et pereat mundus, translates to “Know the truth, though the heavens may fall and the world burn.”

The newest leaks are available for download with Anonymous cited as the source.

The leak comes at a time where neutrality in the Ukraine war is becoming unacceptable in the eye of public opinion.

Western nations are investigating the likely possibility that Russia deployed chemical weapons against Ukraine.

If confirmed, Russia’s use of chemical weapons would be a violation of wartime ethics that could escalate the conflict and potentially elicit a response from NATO or a NATO country acting alone.

“There are some things that are beyond the pale,” a diplomat from the United Kingdom told The Independent.

The war in Ukraine is going on two months of bloodshed.

Alliance lines have been drawn in concrete as NATO backs Ukraine and Belarus, a former Soviet nation, supports Russia.