Ukraine Says 400,000 Volunteers Aid Hacking Against Russia

(Bloomberg) -- More than 400,000 people have volunteered to help a crowdsourced Ukrainian government effort that is using digital means to disrupt Russian government and military targets, according to a Ukrainian cybersecurity official.

Victor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine's information protection service, said in a briefing Friday that the country was engaged in a “cyber resistance” against Russia that was aimed at making the country weaker. The update comes after Ukraine's minister of digital transformation called on international computer specialists to attack Russian web infrastructure.

“Our friends, Ukrainians all over globe, [are] united to defend our country in cyberspace,” Zhora said. Ukraine was working to do “everything possible to protect our land in cyberspace, our networks, and to make the aggressor feel uncomfortable with their actions,” he added.

Volunteers have been working to gather intelligence, and to attack Russian military systems, Zhora said. The group has also been working to “address Russian people directly by phone calls, by emails, by messages” and “by putting texts on their services and showing real pictures of war.”

A channel on the social media app Telegram for the Ukrainian government-endorsed “IT Army” has attracted more than 283,000 members. Thousands of others have joined other Telegram groups that are orchestrating hacks targeting Russian assets.

Zhora said that the volunteer hackers were not targeting civil targets, only military. However, in recent days the Ukrainian IT Army has used Telegram to coordinate attacks against Russian banks and telecommunication companies, according to messages reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Other hacking groups, including Anonymous and the Belarusian Cyber Partisans, are similarly focused on breaching Russian targets to support Ukraine's resistance effort. The impact of the activist groups has been limited, though a range of Russian government sites have reported network outages in recent days, according to the watchdog organization NetBlocks.

Zhora did not expressly endorse the actions of Anonymous but said that he could “understand what they are doing.”

“We do not welcome any illegal activity in cyberspace, we believe that every party should be responsible with their actions. But the world order changed on 24th of February. We have martial law here in Ukraine. And I don't think appealing to moral principles works since our enemy doesn't have any principles.”

Ukraine has faced its own cyberattacks both before and during the invasion. Zhora said that he believed the Russian government staged hacks in advance of the military invasion in preparation for conventional war, a claim boosted by U.S. officials.

In the hours prior to Russia's invasion, some Ukrainian government agencies were targeted with a destructive “wiper” malware that deleted data held on infected computers. Zhora said that there have since been other attempts to spread the wiper through emails that have targeted Ukrainian citizens and government officials.

So far, Zhora said, the country's cyber defenses were holding up well. “In my opinion, we showed Ukraine has enough capacity to resist in cyber aggression,” he said.

Moscow has denied conducting malicious activity in cyberspace.