“Putin’s puppet, this is just the beginning”: Who are Anonymous who claim to have attacked Vučić’s website?

An international group known as “Anonymous” announced today on Twitter that it had attacked the Vucic.rs website, as well as the Serbian army website, which they claim to have taken down. Although they stress that the attacks were successfully carried out, a simple search can be used to check whether the website of the President of the Serbian State is up and running, as well as the website of the Serbian army.

According to them, the website of the President of the Republic was taken down today. They added that this is only the beginning of their “cyber war” with the President of Serbia.

Who are Anonymous?

Anonymous, as a community of hackers without a strict organisation and hierarchy, emerged in the world at the beginning of this century, and they also got their branch in Serbia. However, it is not possible to say for sure whether the Serbian branch is behind the threats against Aleksandar Vucic, the President of Serbia, given the considerable decentralisation and the possibility for anyone to join the group and sign as “Anonymous”. Of course, anyone who has the necessary skills and is sufficiently qualified not to be traced, writes Danas.

As Danas wrote, Anonymous has never organised terrorist attacks on a global scale, or any attacks in the “real” world. They have waged their wars exclusively in cyberspace, hacking into the websites of institutions and organisations they consider undemocratic and leading to destabilisation and inequality in society. Although perceived as criminals by the authorities of many countries, they have a large number of followers among people all over the world, as Anonymous is mainly gathered around a common political idea – the fight against inequality, oppression, centres of power working for the interests of big capital and censorship.

On the other hand, members may have completely different priorities because there is not just one agenda. What they have in common is hiding their identity under the guise of Guy Fawkes. Their most frequent targets are those whom they consider to have abused their power. They attack by taking control of or destroying websites. In recent months, they have been most concerned with hacking Russian websites in the wake of the war in Ukraine. This is also their largest and most massive activity since their inception and they claim to have hacked more than 12 million files and emails from Russia.

Anonymous of Serbia has been in existence since autumn 2011, although the official website was created in early 2012. They are part of the global Anonimus collective and are working intensively together. It is mainly reflected in the exchange of information, knowledge and mutual promotion.

They have only given a few interviews since their foundation, one of the first for Danas newspaper eight years ago. Then one of the administrators and members of the group, nicknamed “Her Click”, told us that their aim was to change the system.

The current system, called “parliamentary democracy”, is only a semblance of real democracy. It is more like a slave society. We are advocating a fairer society in which the government is made up of people who are experts in different fields, who have never been in any party, who have a clean source of wealth and who have the will and the desire to improve people’s lives in Serbia, not constantly robbing them, as politicians have done in every government for the last 20+ years. Above all, we are fighting to expose the criminality and malfeasance of the current ruling “elite” – Her Click said at the time.

Danas reminiscent of the fake news 11 years ago, reported by many media in Serbia, that academic Dobrica Ćosić is a Nobel laureate. This is the first notable “action” by the local Anonymous to draw attention to themselves. They used the SANU email server and published the news on their website. In December 2011, they hacked into the websites of the SNS, the SPS, the DS and the LSV to draw attention to citizens’ dissatisfaction with the political and economic situation in the country. They then destroyed the SOKOJ website, justifying their action by the organisation’s non-transparent business and extremely high fees. In February 2012, the websites of the production companies Grand and Siti Records were taken down with the message – “It has begun – Anonymous Serbia”. This was followed by the hacking of the websites of the UN and the Ministry of Justice… but recently a certain amount of apathy has