Resilient Ukrainian Tech Gurus Engage Russians in Cyber warfare, Say They Want to Send Them Back to Stone Age
- Ukrainians have moved the war to different turf, this time the cyberspace where Russian targets are shared
- About 311,000 Ukrainian cyber soldiers have targeted Russian interests including one of the country's biggest energy companies
- Many of the tech gurus say they see the attacks as part of their contribution to defeating Putin's invading troop
PAY ATTENTION: Click “See First” under the “Following” tab to see Legit.ng News on your Facebook News Feed!
About 311,000 Ukrainian tech gurus are sharing their time doing their normal day jobs and engaging Russia in a cyberwar.
The number joined a group known as IT Army of Ukraine on Telegram where they share Russian targets. Though many of them are not Ukrainians, a great number are, a CNBC report says.
Source: Getty Images
Tech experts troop out against Putin
A Ukrainian software engineer, Dave told the website that the group has helped carry out multi-faceted attacks outside their normal jobs since the Russian invasion began.
Do you have a groundbreaking story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through info@corp.legit.ng!
He said the group had targeted Russian government websites, banks and currency exchanges.
Dave said he is helping the ‘Army’ with DDoS (a distributed denial-of-service) attacks which is a malicious attempt to disrupt and overwhelm a website with a flood of traffic.
The software engineer said he rented some servers from Google Cloud Platform and wrote a bot that accepts website links and targets attacks at them whenever he pastes in. He said he is running attacks from 3-5 different servers and each one produces around 50,000 requests per second.
According to him, whenever a list of targets is shared on the Telegram channel, he just pastes them into a bot and it takes like an hour to create.
He said he cannot tell how successful the attacks are since they were carried out simultaneously by thousands of gurus.
Juggling family, work and attacking Putin
Another tech expert and a quality assurance team leader in a company in Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, Oleksii said that he and his other colleagues are doing their best to keep on working and keep the economy functioning.
He said that during the first few days of the war, the air raid sirens went off for 24 hours non-stop and it's very hard to concentrate on work during such times. You have to think of your family, he said.
Oleksii said that in addition to his regular job, he is trying to help Ukraine win the cyberwar. He said his job is to reach various European and US websites and ask them to stop business dealings with Russia.
Anton, another developer said he personally took it upon himself to direct a DDoS attack on Russian energy companies, Gasprom and Sberbank as well as the Russian government’s sites.
Gazprom and Sberbank are targets
He said there are a lot of people who take part in attacking Russian targets within an extended period of time.
Ukraine is one of the biggest tech hubs in Eastern Europe and its coders are world-class.
Cyber-savvy Ukrainians
The cyber war is fought in two ways. Within the first three days after the invasion, online attacks against Ukrainian military and government sectors intensified by as much as 196 per cent, findings by Check Point Research said.
The Ukrainians targeted Russian interests by 4 per cent, says the data.
They also modestly increased against Russian (4%) and Ukrainian (0.2%) organizations, according to the data, while simultaneously falling in most other parts of the world.
Major food and beverage companies, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s and Starbucks desert Russia
Legit.ng has reported that pressure is mounting on the Russians as more multinational companies desert the Russian market in protests to Putin’s troop’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The latest to join the list of companies leaving the country include PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Starbucks, all of which are US companies, according to a report by CNBC.
The companies each announced on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, that they are suspending businesses in Russia after that country’s aggression in Ukraine.
Source: Legit.ng
