Last week, Wired's Matt Burgess reported that Ukraine's self-described '"IT Army" is launching attacks on Russian websites at an unprecedented scale. The "IT Army" operates as a volunteer group of tech-smart Ukrainians eager to strike back at the Kremlin invader:
"The orders are issued like clockwork. Every day, often at around 5 am local time, the Telegram channel housing Ukraine’s unprecedented “IT Army” of hackers buzzes with a new list of targets. The volunteer group has been knocking Russian websites offline using wave after wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which flood websites with traffic requests and make them inaccessible, since the war started.
Russian online payment services, government departments, aviation companies, and food delivery firms have all been targeted by the IT Army as it aims to disrupt everyday life in Russia. 'Russians have noticed regular hitches in the work of TV streaming services today,' the government-backed operators of the Telegram channel posted following one claimed operation in mid-April." (our emphasis)
According to Burgess' article, it's not just Ukrainian hackers; it's sympathetic hackers from around the world who are angry at war criminal Putin's brutal attack on its neighbor. The hacking mostly takes the form of DDoS attacks, but have occasionally consisted of planting ransomware and malware in Russian computer systems:
"At the start of the war, DDoS was unrelenting. Record levels of DDoS attacks were recorded during the first three months of 2022, according to analysis from Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky. Both Russia and Ukraine used DDoS to try to disrupt each other, but the efforts against Russia have been more innovative and prolonged."
The efforts of the hackers aren't limited to disrupting websites or planting malware. There is evidence that hackers have been able to download millions of sensitive e-mails and data files of the Russian regime that could lead to further embarrassment and disclosures. Dymtro Budorin, the Ukrainian CEO of cyber start-up company Hacken believes the targets of opportunity are rife:
"Budorin says that, beyond pivoting his company’s technology to help launch DDoS attacks, it also created a bug bounty program for people to find and report security flaws in Russian systems. More than 3,000 reports have been made, he says. He claims this includes details of leaked databases, login information, and more severe instances where code can be run remotely on Russian systems. The company validates the vulnerabilities and passes them on to Ukrainian authorities, Budorin says. 'You don't go through the main door,' he says. 'you go through the regional offices. There are so many bugs, so many open windows.'” (our emphasis)
Let's hope that this is another theatre of the war that Ukraine will gain and keep the upper hand.
(illustration: Securitymagazine.com)
