Every morning before going to work in a company software developmentYevhen drinks a cup of coffee and opens several Telegram groups to which you are subscribed to know the objectives of the day. They may be internet providersservices of parcelbanks, government websites or electronic payment systems. All of them, based in the Russia from Vladimir Putin. “We don’t attack essential infrastructures, but we do try to bring down the websites of services and institutions so that they can’t communicate with their clients,” says this thirtysomething with long hair, tattoos and a biker look. The next step is to put one of your computers to work which, throughout the day and in coordination with many others, will be in charge of overloading the servers attacked until they stop working.
Yevhen can’t help but smile mischievously every time he glosses over the exploits of the volunteer army that they are getting out of their boxes Kremlin. Some work in coordination with the Ukrainian government, which two days after the start of the invasion called on the country’s “digital talents” to join the resistance from the cyber realm. Others go by themselves and do not follow any guidelines other than those that they themselves establish through Telegram in various groups also made up of foreign volunteers. The largest have up to 70,000 members. And then there are the heavyweights of the countryless sector known as anonymouswhich wasted no time in declaring “cyber war” on Putin after he announced his “special military operation.”
“I haven’t been in the Army, I don’t know how to shoot, but I have other skills that I’m trying to use to defend my country“, explains Yevhen in a cafeteria in Lviv, the cultural capital of western Ukraine. Almost every day he tries to talk to his mother, who has not wanted to leave Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, and spends her days in a bomb shelter to escape the bombing. “We like to see ourselves as cyber cossackswho also fought centuries ago against Russia to defend our freedom,” says Yevhen, invoking one of the symbols of Ukrainian nationalism.
major damage
In the local imagination, the old Cossacks are the equivalent of the cowboys of the American West and the embryo of the Ukrainian nation, even though not all Cossacks were Ukrainians and not all Ukrainians were Cossacks. But it is true that for centuries they tried to maintain their autonomy from the Polish monarchy in the west and the Russian monarchy in the east, usually in exchange for their services on the battlefield. Until the tsarist empire of the Romanovs, with Catherine the Great as one of his great black beasts, he carried it off in the 18th century.
It is difficult to gauge the damage that the Ukrainian digital offensive is causing in Russia, but everything suggests that it is important. This same Tuesday, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs recognized that the barrage of attacks against his country “is unprecedented” and accused the “cybermercenaries“Ukrainians to be trained by United States and other countries of the NATO. “No one should doubt that the cyber aggression launched against Russia will lead to serious consequences,” he said according to the Tass agency.
Some actions have been truly spectacular, such as the one at the beginning of the conflict in which Anonymous interrupted the programming of several Russian public television stations in unison to broadcast images of bombings on Ukraine and soldiers talking about the horrors of war. An action that has been accompanied by massive data leaks of Russian institutions. On a smaller scale, something similar has been done by cybersoldiers like Yevhen or by groups organized under the umbrella of the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transition.
Information about the war
And it is that they are not only taking down websites with denial of service attacks, but also hacking all kinds of websites to publish information about the war. An example is the tour operator portal IgoToWorld.comwhich went from announcing tourist destinations to publishing a long message that began: “Citizens of Russia and Belarus: Wake up! Your governments are committing war crimes in Ukraine”.
Many are surprised by how easily Russia is being attacked, but also by how little it has achieved with its cyber weapons, when it was supposed to be a major power in the field. To begin with, the experts hoped that he would neutralize at the first opportunity the telecommunications ukrainian, your electric system or their infrastructures, but, except in the most heavily bombed areas, everything continues to function with surprising normality. “The impact has been minimal,” he summed up a few days ago New York Times.
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In fact, the Russian Army has experienced some truly embarrassing episodes. The death of his general Vitaly Gerasimov, which fell on the outskirts of Kharkov, became known because the Ukrainians intercepted a call between two alleged Russian FBU agents through a normal telephone, like the ones anyone uses. And they intercepted it because their military’s stupendous cryptophones, introduced in 2021 to great fanfare, didn’t work. And why didn’t they work? Because “the idiots” bombed many of the 3G and 4G towers in the area that require these encrypted phones, according to the executive director of bellingcatChristo Grozev.
This caricature of Russian power, also very evident in other areas of this war, has also surprised Yevhen, the “cyber cossack” of this story. “We have knocked down the websites of many regional and local banks Russians. We thought that after a while they would be operational again, but some have taken up to three days, “she says.” They sell the image that they are very prepared, that they are milk, but it is rather the opposite “.