Recently, Anonymous Albania has increased its cyberattacks on the Albanian government. Last week, the anonymous hacker group attacked the website of EcoTirana in response to the destruction of the Bus Station Park by Tirana mayor Erion Veliaj.
In a message posted on the hacked website, Anonymous Albania stated:
You destroyed our life, you occupied all our spaces, you drowned us in dust and smog. If these construction works don’t stop we will continue to hack all the website of the municipality and its oligarchs!
This week, another DDoS (denial of service) attack led to nearly 50 websites of different government institutions going offline.
In a recent interview with media outlet Politiko, given by Anonymous Albania member Wlan0mon0, the group announces further attacks on media outlets related to the government who produce “fake news”:
The list of those media channels will be created and their websites will be attacked. Many media outlets have news different from the daily news on television, but those need to be verified well, while the state needs to create a law that prohibits slander […] in all manners by creating fake news only for clicks.
In terms of the ideology driving the group, Wlan0mon0 declared the following:
We want to make a revolution and want to introduce the public to the dark sides of the government. […] Revolution will get rid of criminals. Politicians will do their work, people should have their rights, something that doesn’t happen in Albania. Rights are not respected and we don’t have the freedom to speak openly. […] Our ideology is not to be controlled by this system that has seized us for many years, but to be free.
Yesterday, Anonymous Albania posted another Facebook update asking “What do you think about another attack?”
So far, the publicized actions of Anonymous Albania have only taken the form of temporary blocking access to websites by means of DDoS attacks, or taking over websites, as in the case of EcoTirana. It is unknown whether Anonymous Albania has also exfiltrated information from government websites about its “dark sides.”
