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Pro-Russian hacktivists swarm Australian schools

Updated on: 30 March 2023

Vilius Petkauskas
Senior Journalist

Robin Banks DDoS-Guard — Image by Dado Ruvic, Reuters.

Russia-sympathetic hacktivist groups Killnet and AnonymousSudan launched a wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on several Australian organizations, Cloudflare claims.

Killnet and AnonymousSudan launched an attack campaign on Australia, starting with targeting several of the nation‘s higher education organizations.

“The threat actors called for additional attacks against eight universities, 10 airports, and eight hospital websites in Australia beginning on Tuesday, March 28,” web infrastructure security company Cloudflare said.

Killnet has been targeting governments and organizations that openly support the Ukrainian government in its struggle to fight off the Russian invasion. Earlier this month, Killnet’s leader Killmilk urged partisans to attack German arms seller Rheinmetall.

Recently, pro-Russian hacktivists targeted at least 14 US healthcare organizations, likely in response to President Biden’s promise to provide dozens of military tanks to Ukraine.

While experts have warned people not to underestimate threat actors that mostly employ distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, their effectiveness remains an open question: most of Killnet’s targets suffer a few hours of downtime before returning to normal operations.

Earlier this year, Cloudflare announced the company had mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack that clocked in at over 71 million requests-per-second (rps). However, at the time, the company said the record was unrelated to pro-Russian groups.