Ukrainian Coders in The Middle of Cyber-Warfare

Over 311,000 people have entered a group called “IT Army of Ukraine” on the social media platform Telegram, where Russian targets are shared. While not all of them are from Ukraine, a substantial number of them are, as expressed by group members who spoke to CNBC.

Dave, a Ukrainian software engineer, who chose to withhold his surname due to his comments, informed CNBC that the group has helped carry out multiple cyberattacks outside of their day jobs since the war began. He said targets had contained Russian government websites, Russian banks, and currency exchanges.

He said that he is helping the IT Army run DDoS attacks. A dispersed denial-of-service attack is a malicious try to disrupt regular traffic by crushing it with a flood of internet traffic.

He explained that he rented a few servers on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and wrote a bot for himself that accepts website links and targets attacks at them whenever he pastes them in. He`s usually running attacks from 3-5 servers, and each server usually produces around 50,000 requests per second.

Whenever a list of targets gets shared on the Telegram channel, Dave states he pastes them into a bot, which took around an hour to create.

How Successful Is It?

When asked how prosperous it has been so far, he stated it was hard to say since the attacks are carried out by thousands of people simultaneously. Mixed actions are successful, he said.

Dave is one of about 30 Ukrainians who work remotely for a U.S. tech consultancy firm. The company has made work “fully optional” for its Ukrainian employees.

Oleksii, a quality assurance team lead for a software company in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, informed CNBC that he and his colleagues are doing their best to keep working and keep the economy going. But it’s not been easy.