Ukraine digital army brews cyberattacks, intel and infowar

A man is seen through a bullet hole of a machine-gunned bus after an ambush in the city of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 4, 2022. The cyber volunteers’ effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the DDoS attacks, but generally weather them with countermeasures. — AP

BOSTON: Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the Internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence.

“We are really a swarm. A self-organising swarm," said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.