14 DAY TRIAL // “We do not forget. Your massacre on animals will never be forgiven,” read a tweet posted a few hours ago by the hacktivists behind Operation Ukraine. The message comes after a number of high-profile Ukrainian sites have been targeted with distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.
The list of targets includes the websites of the City of Kiev (kievcity.com.ua) – Ukraine’s capital –, the Ukrainian Soccer Portal (ukrainiansoccer.net), the Football Federation of Ukraine (ffu.org.ua), the Ministry of Agriculture (minagro.gov.ua), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (mvs.gov.ua).
Currently, all the websites appear to be working normally, except for the one owned by the Ministry of Agriculture which has been shut down.
The attacks are part of the second phase of OpUkraine. In a statement posted on August 14, the hacktivists warned that they would continue their online protests against Ukraine’s decision to kill stray dogs.
“Dear Government of the Ukraine, for the second time now you show the world your real cruel face. You violate the European Animal Welfare Act,” they said at the time.
“You have betrayed animal protection organizations. You have lied to the media. Your political system is nothing but corrupt. You violate animal rights. You violate human rights. Therefore you will be attacked by us.”
When will this campaign stop? According to the hackers who run it, “the beatings will continue until morale improves” (famous quotation).
This is not the only reason for which the Ukrainian government has become a target of Anonymous in the past few weeks. Before the second phase of Operation Ukraine started, numerous websites were targeted because of the implication of authorities in the raid on the datacenter in which Demonoid servers were housed.