The IT Army has claimed credit for disrupting Russian services with cyberattacks since the beginning of the war. — Anonymous hacker photo created by standret - www.freepik.com
Pro-Ukrainian hackers are gathering intelligence about Russian military personnel in order to help inform decision-making on the battlefield, according to Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation.
Members of Ukraine’s so-called IT Army, a volunteer band of computer specialists, is assembling a “Book of Executioners” to catalogue Russian soldiers who kill and allegedly torture Ukrainians, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with Bloomberg News from his office in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine.
Officials in Kyiv have previously told Bloomberg they’re documenting suspected Russian hacking incidents as part of a plan to prosecute Russian leaders in an international court.
The purpose, Fedorov said, is “so everyone can understand who entered Ukraine and killed Ukrainians”.
“Modern technologies help us identify Russian war crimes, like facial recognition by artificial intelligence that decodes information from public cameras,” he said.
That data also helps to make decisions on the battlefield, Fedorov said. He declined to say specifically how the hacking guides decision-making.
The IT Army has claimed credit for disrupting Russian services with cyberattacks since the beginning of the war.
In one case, a group of volunteers from the IT Army “completely” hacked RuTube, a Russian video platform owned by a company affiliated with the country’s gas export monopoly, disrupting the site for a week, Fedorov said. The malicious activity was timed to coincide with Victory Day, said the minister. The Russian national holiday marks the country’s victory over Germany in World War II.
The RuTube site was inoperable for three days, according to media reports at the time.
“IT Army even managed to hack RuTube’s employees badges so they could not get inside the company,” Fedorov said.
Gazprom-Media Holding, the subsidiary of Gazprombank that owns RuTube, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The IT Army is also working to deliver news about the war to citizens in Russia, where state-controlled news outlets continue to describe the invasion as a “special forces operation”, according to the minister.
“For Ukraine it is very important to deliver the truth to Russians, to fight propaganda,” Fedorov said. “We need to undermine support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and those who back the war.”
Fedorov’s remarks came after suspected Russian state-sponsored hackers conducted a series of cyberattacks against Ukrainian infrastructure prior to the Feb 24 ground invasion. The incidents were aimed at paralysing banks and government websites and likely took between six months and a year to prepare, Fedorov said. As part of an effort to minimise fallout from the attack, the Ukrainian government shut down websites and diia.gov.ua, an app that citizens use to store passports, driver’s licenses and tax payments.
By that time, Ukrainian officials had spent months preparing for such activity, Fedorov said. Allies had warned Kyiv about digital threats to energy infrastructure, helping the government probe for areas of vulnerability that Ukrainians could patch before Russian hackers took action, he said.
“We set up a red team last autumn and from November started to scan ourselves and attack ourselves and started to introduce new rules for cybersecurity,” he added.
That work remains ongoing. Russian hackers targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, activity that coincided with missile attacks that have sought to cause blackouts in the country, according to Fedorov.
“They were trying to enter the grid,” he said, declining to provide details for security reasons.
“Russians are scanning our systems,” he said. “Anything could be ahead of us so we need to accumulate strength and experience. We are conducting audits all the time.” – Bloomberg
