Ukrainian authorities are asking the country’s hacker underground to help protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber-espionage operations against Russian troops, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The requests for help began to appear on hacker forums on February 24, as Russian military forces began attacking cities across Ukraine.
“Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country,” the post said, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs.
Reuters reports that the post was published by Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity firm Cyber Unit Technologies, at the request of a senior Defense Ministry official.
Another source has confirmed that the request came from the Defense Ministry. Ukraine Defense Ministry did not comment on the information. A defense attache at Ukraine's embassy in Washington told Reuters he “cannot confirm or deny information from Telegram channels.”
According to Aushev, the volunteers would be divided into defensive and offensive cyber units. The defensive unit would be employed to defend infrastructure such as power plants and water systems. The task of offensive unit involves conducting cyber-espionage operations against Russian forces.
“We have an army inside our country,” Aushev said. “We need to know what they are doing.”
On Wednesday, security researchers at ESET and Symantec reported that they found a new data wiping malware that has infected hundreds of computers on Ukrainian networks. Tracked as Win32/KillDisk.NCV and HermeticWiper, the malware targets legitimate drivers from the EaseUS Partition Master software to corrupt data. The malware also would trash the device’s Master Boot Record making the device unbootable.
Symantec’s threat intelligence team, they have found evidence of wiper attacks against machines in Latvia and Lithuania. Targets included entities in the financial, defense, aviation, and IT services sectors.
Cybersecurity Help’s statement on the critical situation in Ukraine
On February 24, people in many cities and towns across Ukraine woke up to the sounds of explosions and artillery fire, as the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of the country. Such actions are unacceptable, political ambitions of any man aren’t worth of blood, tears, and destruction of millions of lives. We give our full support to the Ukrainian people in these hard times. Stop war!