‘We want them to go to the Stone Age’: Ukrainian coders are splitting their time between work and cyber warfare – By Sam Shead (CNBC) / March 23, 2022
- Over 311,000 people have joined a group called “IT Army of Ukraine” on the social media platform Telegram.
- Ukraine is one of the biggest software development hubs in Eastern Europe.
- Its coders are world-renowned.
Hordes of Ukrainian coders are splitting their time between doing their day jobs and fighting a cyber war with Russia.
Over 311,000 people have joined a group called “IT Army of Ukraine” on the social media platform Telegram, where Russian targets are shared. While not all of them are from Ukraine, a significant number of them are, according to members of the group who spoke to CNBC.
Dave, a Ukrainian software engineer, who preferred to withhold his surname due to the nature of his comments, told CNBC the group has helped to carry out multiple cyberattacks outside of their day jobs since the war started. He said targets had included Russian government websites, Russian banks and currency exchanges.
“I’m helping the IT Army with running DDoS attacks,” he said. A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a website by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
