How Ukraine’s cyberwarriors are upending everyday life in Russia
From milk supplies to trains and the weather forecast, a civilian army of IT experts delight in sowing chaos
Last year, milk started disappearing from supermarkets across Russia. The shortages were puzzling. Cows were producing more than ever, according to official statistics, and western sanctions have only recently started targeting the dairy industry.Unfortunately for thousands of Russian farmers, the problem had nothing to do with the productivity of the nation’s udders. The computerised licensing system used to approve meat and dairy products in Russia had been hacked by a collective known as the IT Army of Ukraine.
“The damage was colossal. The manufacturers couldn’t get their products on shelves for days,” Joe, one of the group’s leaders, told The Times. Founded during the early days of the war, the collective has about 10,000 volunteers drawn from across Ukraine’s thriving tech sector. The vigilante hackers communicate over the Telegram app and have proven themselves adept at overwhelming the cyberdefences of Russian companies, TV channels and governmental organisations.
The weather forecast relied on by the Russian military, the national rail company’s online ticketing service and the payment system used to collect tolls on motorways have all been brought down by Ukraine’s bedroom warriors.
“We can’t hit their military infrastructure because it’s isolated and well protected. But we can hit the industries the military uses. When we attack their railways, it affects both their civilian and military trains,” says Joe.
The targets are selected by a senior panel and the volunteers’ preferred method is a “denial-of-service” attack, which involves swarming a website with thousands of requests until its system is overloaded. The group even has a leader board to celebrate the efforts of the most penetrative hackers.
Occasionally the group, which stresses its independence from the government, assists the Ukrainian military with specific requests. When the SBU, the Ukrainian security agency, discovered this year that Russian hackers were helping to direct missile attacks by using CCTV streams to spy on Ukrainian positions, the IT Army set to work to identify the compromised cameras.
But the hackers also take pleasure in showing up the petty concerns of ordinary Russians, implicitly contrasting them with the life-and-death struggles of their countrymen.
When a Russian petrol station chain decided to launch a promotional two-for-one offer on burgers and hot dogs to app users, the hackers decided to take down the app altogether. “What’s up with the app? Why couldn’t it have glitched yesterday instead? Why did it have to fail today?” complained one Russian on social media in a message gleefully shared by the hackers.
“This sort of work is also important because it reminds people in Russia that their country is at war. When they see drones hitting Moscow, when they see that their bank accounts are unavailable, when they see there is no milk in the store, it’s all part of the same thing. It forces them to ask themselves why things are not normal,” says Joe.
The hackers see themselves differently from Russian collectives such as KillNet or Fancy Bear, which are closely aligned with the state.
“We were accused by the Russian media of being run by the White House. Can you imagine President Biden waking up in the morning and directing us to hit some local government offices in Tatarstan?” says Joe, whose alias is an ironic reference to Biden. He says he knows the real first names of only a handful of his online collaborators.
Other online collectives have attempted their own methods to disrupt the lives of ordinary Russians.
An earlier project called IT Stand For Ukraine involved thousands of Ukrainians appealing directly to Russians over social media to convince them of the reality of the war.
Volunteers targeted those with the most reason to oppose the invasion — men facing conscription, the mothers of soldiers — and sent them pictures from the front or dire forecasts about the Russian economy. But they had to abandon the project after six months when its futility became clear.
“We found the mothers of Russian soldiers were more interested in making sure they received compensation if their sons died,” said Oksana Moroz, 31, one of the founders of IT Stand For Ukraine, which at one stage had 2,000 members. “The more funerals that would appear on the news, the more indifferent the reaction would be from ordinary Russians.”
Joe, who is in his early forties, has cousins in Moscow and Yaroslavl who refuse to criticise the war. Does he feel guilty that members of his family could be deprived of services? “I think they can survive without milk given we’re being hit by Russian rockets,” he says.