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LVIV, Ukraine | From an apartment on a quiet street in Lviv, in the still intact western parts of Ukraine, two childhood friends, now in their early 20s, are waging their own silent invasion of the deep. Russiaborders.
In addition to the intense bombardment and ground wars in the cities of eastern Ukraine, marcoRoman, an IT consultant and working in graphic design and marketing, see themselves as infantrymen in a fierce online information war as well as real battles. They said it was a war waged by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians like themselves, who have come together to hack Russian websites since the invasion and bring the Russian people the reality of the war that the Kremlin has banned the official media from. from reporting.
The purpose of this is to create a distraction to be dealt with within the country instead of sending many soldiers to our country,” he said. marcowho, like Roman, wanted this her hide the real name “So when Russia‘s nuclear power plant management system has collapsed, they might consider fixing it instead of sending a lot of soldiers to die here.”
Fired by Ukraine’s “Minister of Digital Transformation” Mykhailo Fedorov’s call for “digital capabilities”, marco and Roman is now part of what is known as “IT”. Army A hacking group operating from inside and outside Ukraine was formed to attack official and unofficial Russian websites and design information campaigns that they distribute via text messages and social media.
It is difficult to determine the official numbers of those involved in the cyber attack. HE IS Army The Telegram chat room used to distribute “operational tasks” to hackers has more than 300,000 subscribers.
A Wednesday post reads “List of Russian oil and gas and energy companies” followed by a list of URLs. “Let’s make these resources inaccessible! Remove it please!”
Other targets include municipal websites and major Russian state media sites.
marco said he is It works with a group of approximately 50,000 people dedicated to performing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks only. While DDoS attacks require coordination, they can be carried out by hordes of people without significant technical acumen, making them the perfect weapon for a large group of hackers with varying degrees of experience.
“The main concept of a DDoS attack is to create a large load on the site” marco said. “Like hundreds of thousands of people accessing the site at the same time.”
There is also little need for equipment or software. A DDoS attack can be carried out from essentially any laptop or mobile phone with a web browser.
It’s also hard to gauge how effective the amateur hacker group is. While a few Russian government websites have been taken offline by DDoS attacks, these are often blocked by countermeasures.
need for coordination
James Knight, a cybersecurity consultant for US-based cyberwar, said the massive, decentralized effort also raises legal questions and could cause more problems for professionals in the intelligence community. He added that uncoordinated attacks could also hinder intelligence-gathering activities carried out by friendly countries.
“The problem is that a lot of real hacking happens inside governments, for example the US government,” he said. “Usually, they don’t download anything unless it’s necessary.”
When a site is shut down in an uncoordinated attack, the opportunity to use that site for other purposes is off the table.
“So what we’re seeing in the intelligence world is that these people doing this are causing more problems than they are fixing,” he said. The best they can do is try to get US intelligence to work in coordination with other agencies and sort of coordinate with them before they start doing these things.”
However, when there are hundreds of thousands of people working voluntarily in the middle of a hot war, such coordination is almost impossible.
But the Ukrainian hacker army launched an all-out offensive against the Russian government’s efforts to hide the truth about the war from the Russians.
“Basically, there is very little information. Russia Mothers of Russian soldiers who died or were captured here do not even know that their sons are here.” marco said. “They apply for their military service and then they say, ‘Hey, it’s all right. him son calls him and tells him‘I’ve been caught. You should help me. Basically these troops are lying to their mothers, and I’m pretty sure their mothers don’t want to be lied to.”
Roman said he started creating lists of thousands of Russian phone numbers, where he sent text messages with the death toll and pictures of captured soldiers.
“I think we want people to understand what’s really going on so they can go out and claim their rights,” Roman said. “Mothers are told not to criticize the situation. Armyand they are told nothing about their son.”
The Russian government quickly caught up with the campaign, marco he said, and began to manually review the text messages.
Since then, the group has changed tactics, posting ads on social media and adding pictures and updates from the war in unlikely places, like Google reviews for restaurants in Moscow.
Roman says he monitors responses to the group’s posts online and adjusts their messages to reach a wider readership. he is Recently, he said, Ukrainian hackers have focused on messaging about the economic impact of the sanctions. Russia and number of popular US and Western trademarks abandoning Russia since the war started. he is said engagement went through the roof.
“The Russians really don’t care how many people die here” he is he said, but the economic fallout is causing a major backlash.
The two said they were waiting Russia He said that they plan to end their activities soon and create campaigns to gather support from Western countries in the future.
“In particular, we really want their authorities to demand action on closing the skies” marco said. “More [countries] involved, the sooner this will be over and the more people will be safe.”
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