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Ukraine creates cyber army to hack Russian websites

What we know about China's alleged state-backed hacking
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Faced with massive cyber-attacks from Russia-backed threat actors, Ukraine has formed a “IT army” tasked with specific cyber challenges, which reached nearly 2 hundred thousand users on Telegram on Monday.

The ‘IT Army of Ukraine’ is also using the Telegram account to contact technology leaders in order to assist the country in fighting Russian cyber-attacks and shutting down Russian sites and their agents.

“A call out on the channel to shut down the API for Sberbank, one of Russia’s major banks, appears to have come into play, with the site currently offline,” reports TechCrunch.

Ukrainian officials have also endorsed the ‘IT Army,’ tweeting out the Telegram link.

“We are creating an IT army. We need digital talents. There will be tasks for everyone. We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists,” tweeted Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation.

The cyber war between Russia and Ukraine has escalated, with Russia employing new destructive malware to permanently destroy data on Ukrainian organisations’ systems.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in an increase in global hacking activity. While Russia-backed hackers have already targeted several Ukrainian government websites and banks, a leading hacking group, Anonymous, has declared its support for “Western allies” while targeting Russian operations.

“The Anonymous collective is officially in cyber war against the Russian government,” the group tweeted.

The IBM Security X-Force team obtained a sample of the new and destructive ‘HermeticWiper’ malware being deleted on Ukrainian systems.

Belarusian state-sponsored hackers are also targeting Ukrainian military personnel’s private email addresses in the midst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a Facebook post, Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) stated that a mass phishing campaign is targeting the private accounts of Ukrainian military personnel.

About the author

Brendan Taylor

Brendan Taylor was a TV news producer for 5 and a half years. He is an experienced writer. Brendan covers Breaking News at Insider Paper.







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