Ukraine war: What part is hackers’ collective Anonymous playing in the war effort against Russia?

They’re mysterious, they’re disruptive, and they’ve picked their side in the war pitting Russia against Ukraine.

The hacker collective Anonymous has claimed credit for several cyberattacks that took down Russian government websites and state-backed news outlets in recent days.

On Monday, several prominent Russian media services appeared to have been hit simultaneously, including the state-run news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti and the newspaper Kommersant.

Their homepages temporarily displayed a message opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, news agency AFP reported.

"Dear citizens. We urge you to stop this madness, don’t send your sons and husbands to certain death. Putin makes us lie and puts us in danger," the message written in Russian said.

"We have been isolated from the whole world, oil and gas are no longer traded. In a few years, we will be living like in North Korea," it added.

When Euronews Next attempted to access TASS’s website on Monday morning, a message appeared saying "an error occurred".

Euronews Next could not independently verify how many websites were affected by the purported attack, nor for how long.

On Thursday, hours after Russia invaded Ukraine, the hacker collective tweeted from an account linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, that it was “officially in cyber war against the Russian government”.

Since then, the group claims it was behind several hacks including distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks – where a site is paralysed because it’s bombarded with traffic – that brought down Russian government websites and that of RT, the country’s state-backed news service.

On Saturday, the websites of the Kremlin, the Duma - the lower house of the Russian parliament - and the Russian defence ministry were