A joint police macrooperation in which agents from 10 European countries have participated, including Spain, and the US, and that has had the support of the authorities of seven other states, has allowed dismantling the infrastructure of the group of computer pirates or hackers called Noname057 (16) near the Vladimir Putin regime, as reported on Wednesday. Noname057 (16) emerged in March 2022, recent Spain.
As Europol has detailed, the baptized as Operation Eastwood began last Monday and has resulted in two arrests and seven international search and capture orders, including those of the two alleged instigators of the group, both of Russian nationality, which have gathered the list of the most sought after in the EU. In addition, 24 home records have been made (half of them in Spain, where there has been an arrest), 13 people have been questioned for their alleged involvement in the events (five of them in Spain) and more than 1,000 supporters of the group have been identified, which they have been informed that they face criminal responsibilities for their supposed support for attacks. Europol emphasizes that the operation has allowed to block more than 100 computer servers used by the group and, with this, much of its “main infrastructure” has been left “out of line”.
Noname057 (16) is the most active and belligerent group of hackers Prorruse. In the founding manifesto, its creators claimed that their objective was to act “proportionally in response to the hostile and openly anti -Russian actions of Western Rusophobes.” Its main activity is to coordinate related cyberactivists to launch in a coordinated manner computer attacks on the so -called Distributed Services Denection (DDOS). That is, the massive traffic shipping to a web page with the aim of collapsing it and that cannot be accessible to the rest of Internet users.
To do this, this group related to the Kremlin developed a software Own, baptized as Ddosia, which has made available to those hackers that support the purposes of the group. The attacks of denial of services, beyond the reputational damage that causes revealing the vulnerability of a website, are not especially serious, according to experts. The most common is that the affected pages are operational again on the same day of the attacks. In July of last year, and adults in the Mallorcan town of Manacor, and in the Andalusians of Huelva and Seville for their alleged participation in claimed by Noname057 (16).
Agency under the National Intelligence Center (CNI), identified, Noname057 (16) as the author of the cyber attack launched on October 14, 2022 against the website of the Ministry of Defense. Noname057 (16) is also attributed to having tried to knock the website of the Ministry of Interior during the day of the general elections of July 23, 2023. In reality, it had specific problems for three hours that afternoon, although it did not affect at any time the special page opened by the department of Fernando Grande-Marlaska to inform in real time of the scrutiny of the elections.
That day, the websites of the Moncloa Palace, the National Statistics Institute (INE), Renfe, the Central Electoral Board, the Royal House or the Arbitration Court of Madrid, although in reality they were mostly operational. They did suffer problems of the transport consortium of the Community of Madrid and that of the tourist buses of the capital of Spain, as well as the Sociobus company, for the sale of bus tickets. Noname057 (16) then released a statement in which they assured that these attacks were the response of Spanish support to Ukraine and, specifically, to the announcement days before sending kyiv’s army to combat cars. “We don’t care if right or left come to power in this country today [por el 23-J]: Both sides adhere to a pro -European position, ”they said in an English note.
In 2023 and 2024, the criminal network participated in attacks against the Swedish authorities and banking entities of this country. In addition, Germany has suffered 14 waves of attacks against more than 250 companies and institutions. In Switzerland they also perpetrated multiple cyber attacks in June 2023, coinciding with the Volodimir Zelenski videoconference intervention before the Parliament of this country; and in June 2024 during the Peace Summit for Ukraine in Bürgestock. Recently, the Netherlands have notified an attack linked to this network during the last NATO summit held in this country.
