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When the Russian military invaded Ukraine in a blitzkrieg of heavy weapons, pro-Ukraine hacktivists looking to take down www.mil.ru met with something unexpected: error 418 in which the server announced that it could not complete the request because it was a teapot.
The teapot fallacy is a decades-old April Fools’ joke, occasionally told to tell hackers that their attempts have been predicted and blocked. “It’s almost like giving the middle finger,” Amit Serper, director of security research at Akamai, told BuzzFeed News. Akamai, like its competitor Cloudflare, uses many pipes that support the internet.
A few days later, the teapot error disappeared, and mil.ru and the websites of prominent Russian banks such as Gazprombank went dark for most internet users outside of Russia. The government has a geofenced lock website – meaning that those outside the country cannot access the site, so it cannot be hacked.
“I think the Russians understand that whatever they do to others, the same thing can be done to them,” Serper said. “With geofencing you make it impossible for people outside of Russia to reach all these targets.”
In other words, Russia has hoped to retaliate for the invasion of Ukraine and has preempted cyberattacks that it suspected would come – and they did.
A day after the invasion began, Reuters reported that a prominent Ukrainian businessman was working with his government to assemble a phalanx of volunteers for cyber offense and cyber defense. While the offense will conduct espionage operations, the defense will secure critical infrastructure such as Ukraine’s power plants and water treatment facilities that have been targeted by Russia in the past. Then Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov called for volunteers to join the Telegram channel for Ukrainian IT Army. “There is a task for everyone. We continue to fight on the cyber front,” said Federov.
Since then, social media accounts linked to hacker collectives and pro-Ukraine Telegram groups have claimed that groups such as Anonymous have taken several Russian websites and servers offline. But Russia’s geofence and Russia’s long history of spreading disinformation make it difficult to confirm whether the website was hacked, and if so, how long it took before it was restored.
But even if the hackers’ claims are true, security experts don’t know the consequences of crowdsourced attacks.
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