Explained: What is IT Army of Ukraine and how is it carrying cyber warfare against Russia?

While the unrelenting march of Russian forces on land is met with strong Ukrainian defence, a different kind of warfare led by a global army of IT experts is raging against the invading army from behind computer screens.

Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, invited “digital talents” on Twitter to create an IT army.

The Telegram channel created by Fedorov has more than 3,00,000 subscribers so far.

The aim of this IT army of Ukraine is simple: to attack the digital presence of the Russian government and its infrastructure, including banks, state-owned media houses, and energy giant Gazprom.

Why has an army of IT experts from across the world joined Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion and how is it carrying the next-gen of warfare against the invading country:

IT Army of Ukraine and its mysterious ways

After Ukrainian vice president Mykhailo Fedorov called for support from like-minded tech-savvy people from around the world, an army three lakh strong rallied in front of their computer screens.

Even though Russia has some of the best hackers in the world, it’s the Ukraine’s international army of volunteer hackers that has made futuristic cyber warfare an important tool in the country’s defence.

According to a CNBC report, which quotes Check Point Research, online attacks against Ukrainian military and governmental sectors increased by 196 per cent in the first three days following the invasion.

Since then, some 400,000 multinational hackers have volunteered to help counter Russia’s digital attacks, said Yuval Wollman, president of cyber security company CyberProof, as quoted by CNBC.

According to the CPR data, Ukraine has sustained a barrage of online attacks even after three week since the invasion. Most of the attacks are aimed at the Russian government and military.

NetBlocks, a company that monitors global internet connectivity, says that the sprawling army of hackers has been successful in disrupting Russian web services.

According to a report by The Guardian, the availability of the websites of the Kremlin and the Duma – Russia’s lower house of parliament – has been “intermittent” since the invasion started. The sites for state-owned media services, several banks and the energy giant Gazprom have also been targeted.

“The crowdsourced attacks have been successful in disrupting Russian government and state-backed media websites,” says Alp Toker, the director of NetBlocks.

In the last week of February, Ukraine’s law enforcement authority SBU made its recruitment of allied volunteer hackers official.

“CYBER FRONT IS NOW OPEN! Help Ukrainian cyber experts hack occupant’s platforms!” it said on its Telegram channel, asking for tips on vulnerabilities in Russian cyber defenses, including software bugs and login credentials.

“It is the first time that states have openly called for citizens and volunteers to cyberattack another state,” said Gabriella Coleman, a Harvard anthropology professor who has charted the rise of hacktivism, as quoted by the Associated Press.

One hacker group that first appeared last year, the Belarus Cyber Partisans, recently claimed to have disrupted some rail service in Belarus, the northern neighbour of Ukraine from which several prongs of Russia’s military attacked.

The group has been trying to frustrate Russian troop and hardware movements through Belarus.

Another group that calls itself Anonymous made a public declaration of war against Russia.

According to a report by The Guardian, the group has since claimed credit for several cyber attacks including distributed denial of service {DDoS} attacks, which leave a site unreachable by increasing traffic on it, on government websites and state-backed news service Russia Today.

It also claimed to have hacked the Ministry of Defence database and posted pro-Ukraine content on Russian TV channels.

It is being feared that the ongoing cyber warfare may have a spilling effect on other long-standing territorial conflicts as well.

According to CNBC, two Taiwanese tech startups, AutoPolitic and QSearch, have announced plans to provide free technology assistance to Ukraine and to “Ukrainian online activists around the globe” to counter Russian propaganda on social media.

With inputs from agencies

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