On DDoS Attacks as an Expression of Digital Protest in the Russo-Ukrainian War 2022

In February 2022, a new escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war began in Europe. While certain events were foreshadowing an escalation, the Russian troops moved to the territory of Ukraine on February 24th. Later on the same day, the hacktivism collective “Anonymous” stated to be in a cyber war with the Russian government and called for support by overloading specific Russian web servers. Since the beginning of this escalation, we observe these servers and measure their availability. In this paper, we investigate whether the downtimes of these servers correlate to the calls of “Anonymous” and what changes were made to these servers. It is inevitable to discuss whether such actions – usually seen as attacks on service availability – should be seen as an expression of digital protest.