International hacking group, Anonymous, on Friday declared ‘cyber war’ against the government of Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.

Anonymous is a decentralised hacktivist group with no hierarchy or leadership. Their main aim is to target establishment hypocrisy and corruption.

It has become involved with a wide range of global issues in the past, having previously launched attacks on the CIA, the Church of Scientology, ISIS.

On Friday, the hacktivist disclosed that it had disabled several websites belonging to Russian government, the Kremlin, the Duma, and the Ministry of Defence.

Anonymous also claimed to have taken down the website of Kremlin-backed TV channel, Russia Today, which broadcasts in Britain.

UK Metro reports that earlier this week, the news network was described by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as Putin’s ‘personal propaganda tool’.

There were complaints from viewers that when they attempted to access the site on Friday morning, the portal said it was inaccessible and displayed an error message saying ‘this site can’t be reached’.

RT.com confirmed the attack and said it had slowed some websites down and took others offline for ‘extended periods of time’.

This was followed up by a message on Twitter by a user claiming to represent Anonymous.

He said: ‘The Anonymous collective is officially in cyber war against the Russian government.’

About 40 minutes later, the group said it had ‘taken down the website of the #Russian propaganda station RT News’.

It added: ‘We read your messages, thank you for supporting Ukraine. Let’s be united!’

Political observers believed that the group is using a relatively simple method known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, a process that involves overwhelming a website with a flood of traffic until it can no longer cope.

Anonymous, over the years, is known to carry out DDos attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal for cutting their services to Wikileaks.

It also claimed responsibility for an attack on the Minneapolis Police Department following the death of George Floyd.