Ukrainian cyber group to launch guerrilla warfare on Russian power grid

Russian foreign ministry says its embassies were under cyberattack by ‘cyber terrorists from Ukraine’

People look at the gutted remains of Russian military vehicles on a road in the town of Bucha, close to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, on 1 March 2022 (AP)

A Ukrainian cyber resistance group said it planned to attack key Russian infrastructure, including the railways and electricity grid, to retaliate against Moscow’s invasion of the country.

Yegor Aushev, a local cybersecurity expert, said on Monday that he planned to organise a group of hackers in Ukraine to defend against Russia, Reuters reported. The targets would include infrastructure that helped Russians bring weapons to Ukraine for the invasion.

“Everything that might stop the war. The goal is to make it impossible to bring these weapons to our country,” he was quoted as saying.

Mr Aushev also claimed to have targeted some Russian government websites and those of banks, but refused to provide more detail.

He claimed to have replaced images on those websites with the images from the war zone that Ukraine is in right now.

The Ukrainian government had also called on volunteers from the country’s hacker underground to help protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber spying missions against Russian troops, two anonymous sources involved in the project confirmed.

At the same time, a campaign has been underway among the hacktivist collective Anonymous, calling on its global cyber army to target Russia. Anonymous is a global activist community that has been operating since at least 2008.

Mr Aushev said his group has more than 1,000 volunteers so far from Ukraine and other countries. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was quoted as saying by the country’s local media that its embassies were under attack by “cyber terrorists from Ukraine”.

Apart from Mr Ausehv’s cyber resistance group, another hacker organisation — the Belarusian Cyber Partisans — volunteered to hack Belarus’ railway network as it was used to transport Russian soldiers.

It was reported last week that Belarusian Cyber Partisans hacked into the computers that control Belarus’ trains and brought some to a halt in an attempt to stop the Russian army.

On Monday, a Cyber Partisans spokeswoman confirmed the group had carried out those attacks and that her organisation was now working with Mr Aushev’s group.

The spokeswoman said: “We fully side with Ukrainians. They are now fighting for not only their own freedom but ours too. Without an independent Ukraine, Belarus doesn’t stand a chance.”