Ukraine is asking support from international volunteers to launch cyberattacks against Russia according to a tweet from the country"s digital transformation minister. Mykhailo Fedorov announced on Twitter that he wanted to assemble an "IT army" on Telegram and that there will be tasks for everyone.
We are creating an IT army. We need digital talents. All operational tasks will be given here: https://t.co/Ie4ESfxoSn. There will be tasks for everyone. We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists.
— Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) February 26, 2022
The Telegram channel has quickly grown to more than 180,000 users as of writing this article. In a translated post in English, the channel said, "We encourage you to use any vectors of cyber and DDoS attacks on these resources.”
According to a post in the channel, cyberattacks have hit Russian governmental service portals, Kremlin, Parliament, First Channel, Aerospace, Railroad websites with over 50+ DDoS attacks contained over one terabyte capacity.
The channel members were also directed to report YouTube channels that posted pro-Russia videos so that YouTube will remove them. The channel also targeted websites from Belarus after reports indicated that the country had helped Russian troops to use its territory in order to invade Ukraine.
However, as pointed out by Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, Telegram is a really bad choice for such an operation.
It"s amazing to me that after all this time, almost all media coverage of Telegram still refers to it as an "encrypted messenger."
— Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) December 23, 2021
Telegram has a lot of compelling features, but in terms of privacy and data collection, there is no worse choice. Here"s how it actually works:
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The news also comes after Anonymous announced it has declared a cyber-war against Russia. The group later claimed that it has hacked Russian state TV channels to broadcast the truth about what is happening in Ukraine.