![]() ![]() From Russia, where links between the government and hacking groups have long raised alarms among Western officials, there has not been the same kind of overt calls to action. In Telegram channels, participants cheer their collaboration with the government in going after targets such as Sberbank, the Russian state-owned bank. Ukraine has been more deliberate about recruiting a volunteer hacking force. “Cyberattacks can’t realistically impact this.” ![]() “The land invasion is advancing, people are suffering, buildings are being destroyed,” said Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and a former cyberwarfare adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. ![]() While hackers affiliated with the Russian government have quietly infiltrated American government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, these participants have loudly proclaimed their allegiances and used simpler methods to topple or deface websites.Īnd while their tactics appear to have been successful in some instances, security researchers cautioned it was unrealistic to believe cyberattacks by volunteer hackers without specialized technical expertise would play a determinative role in the military campaign on the ground. Their attacks stand apart from the sophisticated incursions made by nation-state hackers in recent years. It was impossible in some circumstances to verify their identities. Some said they were citizens of other countries who were simply interested in the conflict. Some of the hackers said they were Ukrainians living inside and outside the country. The involvement of the volunteer hackers makes it more difficult to determine who is responsible for an online attack. The hundreds of hackers now racing to support their respective governments represent a drastic and unpredictable expansion of cyberwarfare. But experts said that those efforts have attracted fewer participants. Hackers have inserted themselves in international conflicts before in places like Syria. But both Ukraine and Russia appear to have embraced tech-savvy volunteers, creating channels on the chat app Telegram to direct them to target specific websites. The online battles have blurred the lines between state-backed hackers and patriotic amateurs, making it difficult for governments to understand who is attacking them and how to retaliate. There are going to be participants that are not under the strict control of any government.” “This is not going to be solely a conflict among nations. “It is crazy, it is bonkers, it is unprecedented,” said Matt Olney, the director of threat intelligence at the security firm Cisco Talos. The war in Ukraine has provoked an onslaught of cyberattacks by apparent volunteers unlike any that security researchers have seen in previous conflicts, creating widespread disruption, confusion and chaos that researchers fear could provoke more serious attacks by nation-state hackers, escalate the war on the ground or harm civilians. And they swarmed into chat rooms, awaiting new instructions and egging each other on. They knocked Russian and Ukrainian government websites offline, graffitied antiwar messages onto the home pages of Russian media outlets and leaked data from rival hacking operations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |