Formed in a fury to counter Russia's blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine's hundreds-strong volunteer "hacker" corps is more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe's first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence. "We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm," said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of the bootstrap digital army, the AP reports. The volunteers' inventions include software tools that let smartphone and computer owners anywhere participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites and bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block disinformation, let people report Russian troop locations, and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.
Zahkarov ran research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine's digital self-defense corps. His group, StandForUkraine, includes software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers, and online ad buyers, he said. The movement is global, drawing on IT professionals in the Ukrainian diaspora whose handiwork includes web defacements with antiwar messaging and graphic images of death and destruction in the hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion. "Both our nations are scared of a single man," Zakharov said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "just out of his mind." Volunteers reach out person-to-person to Russians with phone calls, emails and text messages, he said, and send videos and pictures of dead soldiers.
Some build websites, such as a "site where Russian mothers can look through (photos of) captured Russian guys to find their sons," Zakharov said from Kyiv. The cyber volunteers' effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the attacks but generally weather them with countermeasures. And it's impossible to say how much of the disruption—including more damaging hacks—is caused by freelancers working independently of but in solidarity with Ukrainian hackers. A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, insisted at his first online news conference of the war on Friday that homegrown volunteers were attacking only military targets, in which he included the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media, and railways. (Ukrainians were warned to expect cyberattacks.)
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