The ongoing invasion of Ukraine has resulted in everyday citizens picking up arms to push back Russian forces. However, while some are engaging physical battles against the imperial forces, Ukranian coders are fighting on the digital front. Just like the rest of the country, they're putting up one hell of a fight.
Ukranian coders fight Russia in cyber warfare
Reported by CNBC, a group of over 300,000 people have digitally banded together to fight Russia. Known as “The IT Army of Ukraine”, the group mainly consists of Ukranian coders taking on the country between doing their day job.
Joined together through a Telegram group, the coders work through a giant list of daily Russian targets. For example, some days the coders-turned-hackers will target a Russian state news websites, others will see them taking on banks and currency exchanges.
One coders, a software engineer called Dave, has been involved in the Ukranian cyber war between work hours. Just like thousands of other Ukranian coders, he helps to take down a multitude of high-profile Russian services using DDoS — distributed denial of service — attacks.
“I’ve rented a few servers on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and wrote a bot for myself that just accepts website links and targets attacks at them whenever I paste them in,” Dave told CNBC. “I’m usually running attacks from 3-5 servers and each server usually produces around 50,000 requests per second.”
Dave explained that the “combined actions” of the IT Army of Ukraine “are definitely successful”. Alongside thousands of other hackers, Russian services go down with ease. However, DDoS attacks are not the only tool in the Ukranian coders’ pockets.
Read More: Anonymous joins with Ukraine to declare Cyber War against Russia
Send them back to the Stone Age
Another hacker in the Ukranian IT Army explained that the group is also leaking the financial information of thousands of Russian citizens. Known as Nikita, the founder of a cybersecurity firm, the hacker has a group of workers dealing massive damage to the Russian economy.
Nikita explained that he is aiming to inflict a substantial amount of harm to Russia’s damaged economy. While the hacker doesn't hate the Russian people, and is grateful to Russians supporting Ukraine, he’s not messing around.
“I published like 110,000 credit cards in the Telegram channels,” Nikita said. “We want them to go to the Stone Age and we are pretty good at this.”
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