Ukraine Minister Announces IT Army, Recruits Civilians to Attack Russia on Cyber Front

Amid the escalating Ukraine-Russia war, Ukraine vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that they are creating an IT army and asked civilians to join them in cyber attacking Russia. The VPM, who is also the minister of digital transformation, has earlier requested tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to help Ukraine in fighting the invasion online. In the latest request, he has asked civilians to join a Telegram channel ‘itarmyofurraine’ which has almost 32,000 subscribers now. He wrote: “We are creating an IT army. We need digital talents. All operational tasks will be given here: https://t.me/itarmyofurraine. There will be tasks for everyone. We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists.”

According to a report in USA Today, members of the Telegram channel are being asked to use any vectors of cyber and DDoS attacks against Russian websites. Distributed denial of service (DDoS ) makes websites unreachable by flooding them with traffic. Russia has announced that it is limiting access to Facebook, after the Meta-owned social media giant refused to comply with the country’s order to stop fact-checking and content warning labels on its platforms amid Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. The Russian communications regulator said that Facebook had ignored demands to lift restrictions on four Russian media outlets on its platform.