War in Ukraine: Kiev seeks to add hackers to its frontline ranks

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Just Days After Deploying Its Ground Troops To Fight Invading Russia, Ukraine Started Recruiting Volunteers lead a battle against Moscow in cyberspace.

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This initiative culminated in the creation of the EN Army of Ukraine (Ukrainian Cyber ​​​​Army), a division created by the Ministry of Digital Affairs in March 2022 with the aim of disrupt the IT infrastructure of Russia and Belarus.

Currently made up of around 200,000 volunteer hackers from around the world, the Ukrainian government now wants to follow in the footsteps of other European countries and pass laws to incorporate this cyber reserve into its Armed Forces officially.

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Among other things, this law would allow the Ukrainian government to turn these hacker attacks against Russia into attacks lawsuits.

Build a cyber army

Until now, only Finland and Estonia had a cyber force of foreign reservists to support their regular armies in case of cyber attacks.

Other EU countries, such as France, have preferred to create highly specialized military units tasked, for example, with monitoring the network, or capable of carrying out cyber retaliation in the event of a major attack on critical IT infrastructure.

“The Law on the Creation and Operation of Cyber ​​Forces in the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine should be approved soon”, recently said Nataliya Tkachuk, secretary of the National Cyber ​​​​​​Security Coordination Center of Ukraine, in an interview with the American weekly Newsweek.

Not everyone agrees with this strategy. Among the detractors is Danien Bancal, founder of the Zataz.com site and specialist in cybercrime and cybersecurity, who claims that incorporating these groups of volunteer hackers into the ranks of the army It’s a bad idea.

This cyber army offers different digital tools to netizens. It started by providing Internet addresses to attack. Subsequently, he published specialized websites where Internet users, staying connected, sent requests for a massive “attack” against Russia from their computers. The command of the Ukrainian Cyber ​​Army has also offered to download an automatic attack software to install it directly on the computer itself,” he said in an interview with Radio France International (RFI).

“The risk for users is that they provide this program with their machine and connection resources without any means of control. This can have dramatic consequences for the user, but also for the digital infrastructure of your country. Furthermore, those who improvise cyber soldiers from their living room should quickly understand that the war in Ukraine, even if it is digital, It’s not a video game at all“, emphasizes the expert.

A “patriotic hack” that is difficult to identify

The Zataz site has already identified a hundred of these “groups” of amateur hackers who have launched cyberguerrilla actions. Some hackers claim to be pro-Ukrainian, others claim to be acting on behalf of Russia, or even appearing under a Chinese flag. It is impossible to determine with certainty whether these attackers are operating on behalf of one party or the other.

Russia is considering issuing a similar law, proposing to legalize “patriotic hacking,” which would be carried out by various pro-Russian groups to harass state institutions in Europe and the United States. However, it should be noted that these shares, whether they come from Russia or from other countries, have not yet been successful.

Source: RFI

Source: Clarin

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