“We will continue to fight on the cyber front.”
Ukraine is looking for international volunteers to help carry out cyberattacks on Russia. Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s digital transformation minister, took to Twitter on Saturday afternoon to announce the formation of a “IT army” on Telegram. “Everyone will have a task,” he said. “We’re still fighting on the cyber front.”
The channel has over 26,000 subscribers as of the writing of this article. The Ukrainian government encourages people to “use any vectors of cyber and DDoS attacks” on a variety of Russian targets in one post, which The New York Times translated into English. In a separate post, the country encourages people to report YouTube channels that are posting pro-Russian content in order to have them delisted. That call to action came at around the same time YouTube said it was temporarily barring Russia Today and other Kremlin-affiliated channels from earning ad revenue on the platform.
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The call for volunteers also came after Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down multiple Russian government websites, including those belonging to the Kremlin and Ministry of Defence.
The choice to manage the effort on Telegram is one that could hurt Ukraine in the long run. As Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal points out, Telegram isn’t encrypted in the way most people think it is. Unless you enable its Secret Chat feature, your conversations aren’t end-to-end encrypted, which means the company can unlock most messages at any time. In the current situation, that’s a problem because many Telegram employees have family in Russia, and, as Marlinspike notes, there’s a scenario in which the country’s government could exploit that fact.
