IT Army for Ukraine
I have to give the Ukrainians a lot of credit on a lot of fronts-- their military tenacity against a theoretically superior foe, their use of social media, compassion toward POWs, trying to keep the nuke reactors in SAFE mode in the middle of a war, political leadership with a backbone and the list goes on and on. The one thing that I found interesting is their enlistment of this so called IT Army to basically crowd source hacking and other actions via the internet against Russia and Belarus in an organized and targeted way. The article I read said it was being organized through the Telegram platform and directed by the minister of IT in The Ukraine government. Per the article, 300,000 people worldwide have signed up and while not all are highly accomplished hackers, it's a pretty impressive show of support from the tech-o-sphere. So far they have messed with various RU government departments as well as the Belarus railway system. If we can't impose a No Fly zone or put boots on the ground, this is a way to take some of the pain of war home to RU proper. Something that will be hard to hide from the average Russian or Belarussian.
The downside to this is that RU has significant hacking capabilities of its own. And while the IT Army is globally diverse, RU may well unleash it's own capabilities against the EU, US and others allied against RU in this fight. Certainly nuclear war would be worse, but turning the lights out or shutting off the water in places will also be very bad if not as catastrophic. I guess my point with all of this is while we think the war is half the globe away, it could come home to many of us all to soon in some way. I guess we will find out how good our firewalls and cybersecurity is.
