According to a Reuters report, the Ukraine government is calling on the hacker underground to come to its aid by protecting critical infrastructure and conducting cyber spying missions against the Russia.
Requests for volunteers began to appear on hacker forums on Thursday morning as Russia continued its invasion of Ukraine.
“Ukrainian cybercommunity! It’s time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country,” the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references.
Yegor Aushev, the co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he wrote the post at the request of a senior Defense Ministry official who contacted him on Thursday. Aushev’s firm Cyber Unit Technologies is known for working with Ukraine’s government on the defense of critical infrastructure.
Though the Ukraine Defense Ministry representatives have not officially denied or confirmed this, someone else directly involved in the effort confirmed that the request came from the Defense Ministry on Thursday morning.
Aushev said 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 while the offensive would help Ukraine’s military conduct digital espionage operations against invading Russian forces.
“We have an army inside our country,” Aushev said. “We need to know what they are doing.” On Wednesday, a newly discovered piece of destructive software was found circulating in Ukraine, hitting hundreds of computers, according to researchers at the cybersecurity firm ESET. Suspicion fell on Russia, which has repeatedly been accused of hacks against Ukraine and other countries.
Earlier this month, a Ukrainian security official said the country had no dedicated military cyber force, the Washington Post reported. “It’s our task to create them this year,” he told the Washington Post.
