Cyber Anakin is the pseudonym of a computer hacktivist who named himself after Anakin Skywalker, a Star Wars character.
History
Early history
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in Ukrainian airspace amidst the War in Donbass. In 2016 in response to this Cyber Anakin who was a teen back then started hacking, targeting Russian websites and databases including the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, news site and email provider km.ru and gaming companyNival Networks. The information gained during the breaches included dates of birth, encrypted passwords, and geographic locations. In the case of km.ru, secret questions and answers were obtained. There were 1.5 million victims. The km.ru and Nival data breaches were confirmed by computer security researcher Troy Hunt. In a subsequent interview with online news outlet VICE Motherboard, Cyber Anakin said that he had done the hacks in retaliation for the Russians causing the MH17 crash. The stolen data were eventually cataloged by a group calling themselves "Distributed Denial of Secrets" among other leaked Russian documents/data, under the "Dark side of the Kremlin" collection. Besides that he performed denial-of-service attacks against several Russian websites in support of Ksenia Sobchak's presidential campaign during the 2018 Russian presidential election.
Activities against North Korea
In 2018 as a response to the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, Cyber Anakin took advantage of an error in a North Korean propaganda website ournation-school.com that erroneously linked to a non-existent Twitter account @juche_school1 instead of its actual official profile @juche_school. As an "April Fools prank" he registered a spoof account under that empty username and posted numerous anti-DPRK propaganda messages including unflattering images and obscene slurs directed against Kim Jong-un. According to North Korea Tech's website directory, the ournation-school.com website is run by Kim Il SungOpen University which teaches Juche philosophy teachings in Korean.
He was also involved in spreading messages via TV set top boxes in opposition against Article 13 of the European Union's Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. In an interview with ZDNet, he expressed concerns that the proposed filter will "let things which shouldn't to pass through and block those that should be allowed". He also warned that the Internet "will become a boring, gloomy place" if MEPAxel Voss "has his way".
Subsequent activities
In the aftermath of Ukraine International Airlines 752 shoot-down, Cyber Anakin defaced the website of Water and Power Organization of Khuzestan, Iran and placed the names of Flight 752's victims on its webpage. His nationality was hinted but not confirmed to be Iranian. Since 2019 Cyber Anakin was involved in an effort that was named #FreeHKSaveKorea by employing methods such as printer hacking in order to spread a modified version of a peace plan first proposed in the book "Stop North Korea!: A Radical New Approach to Solving the North Korea Standoff" written by former Inha University professor Shepherd Iverson. In the book he suggested "buying out North Korea" with a $175 billion fund to achieve re-unification of the Korean peninsula. Shortly after that it was further disseminated by the Anonymous hacking collective during their United Nations hack.
