Vladimir Putin’s Attack on Ukraine met with fierce resistance throughout the towns and cities of the country. Equal Russian forces close to KyivLawyers, students and actors have raise your arm to protect their country from invasion. They’re not the only ones: Volunteers have also flocked to the Ukrainian volunteer “IT Army” that is fighting back online.
At around 9pm local time on February 26, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of a volunteer cyber army. “We have a lot of talented Ukrainians in the digital sector: developers, network specialists, designers, copywriters, marketers,” he said in a post on the official Telegram channel. mine. “We continue to fight on the cyber front.”
Ukraine has seen other volunteer-organized hacking and hacking attempts before and early in the war effort. Only hacktivists, including the hacking group Anonymous, have stated DDoS attacks against Russian targets and get data from Belarusian arms manufacturer Tetraedr. But the development of Army IT, a volunteer government-led unit designed to operate in the midst of a fast-moving war zone, is unprecedented.
Fedorov said the mission of the IT Army is being assigned to volunteers through a separate Telegram channel. To date, more than 175,000 people have signed up — just hit the ‘Join’ button on the public channel — and many tasks have already been done. For example, the administrators of the channel asked subscribers to carry out distributed denial of service attacks against more than 25 Russian websites. These include Russian infrastructure enterprises, such as energy giant Gazprom, the country’s banks and official government websites. Websites belonging to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Kremlin and the communications regulator Roskomnadzor were also listed as potential targets. Russian news sites followed.
Since then, the IT Army channel has expanded its scope of activities. On February 27, it asked volunteers to target sites registered in Belarus, one of Russia’s key allies. The channel has also asked subscribers to report YouTube channels accused of “publicly lying about the war in Ukraine”.
A former Ukrainian official with knowledge of the IT Army organization said the organization was established as a way for Ukraine to fend off Russian cyberattacks. Russia has significant hacking capabilities: wiper attacks hit a Ukrainian bank in cumulative invasion and government websites have been taken offline. “Our country does not have any force or intention to attack anyone. Hence – we made a call,” said the former Ukrainian official. “We already know that they are pretty good at cyber attacks. But now we will find out how well they work in cyberdefense,” said the former official.
J. Michael Daniel, industry group leader of the Cyberthreats Coalition and former White House Cyber Coordinator for President Barack Obama. “Part of it is also a signaling exercise. It signals a level of commitment across Ukraine to stand against what the Russians are doing. “
To date, it has been difficult to gauge the impact of the IT Army. While thousands of members have joined the Telegram channel, there is no indication of who they are or their involvement in any of the responses. The channel has shared screenshots of several Russian websites that are believed to have been taken offline, but it is unclear how successful these efforts were or where they originated.
