A man is seen through a bullet hole of a machine-gunned bus after an ambush in the city of Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. As a small group of reservists buried their comrade, 54-year-old Volodymyr Nezhenets , who was one of three killed on February 26 in an ambush, according to the Ukrainian authorities, caused by Russian “saboteurs”, a few kilometers from the cemetery, the remains of the convoy in which Volodymyr was killed 6 days ago are still on the road with charred vehicles, a bus riddled with bullets, a bloodstain on the driver’s seat.
In this image from the video, Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cybersecurity official, holds a press conference for international media Friday, March 4, 2022, from a bunker in Kyiv, Ukraine. Zhora said local volunteers in Europe’s first major war of the internet era only attack what they see as military targets, prioritizing government services including the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media and the railways.
By FRANK BAJAK – AP Technology Writer
BOSTON (AP) — Formed in the fury of countering Russia’s blitzkrieg, Ukraine’s volunteer ‘hacker’ corps, made up of hundreds of volunteers, is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial for information warfare and intelligence crowdsourcing.
“We really are a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT manager at the Ukrainian Digital Army Center.
Inventions by willful hackers range from software tools that allow smartphone and computer owners anywhere to participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites to bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block misinformation, allow people to report the location of Russian troops, and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.
Zahkarov conducted research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine’s Digital Self-Defense Corps. His group is StandForUkraine. Its ranks include software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers and online ad buyers, he said.
The movement is global, drawing on Ukrainian diaspora IT professionals whose work includes web defacements with anti-war messages and graphic images of death and destruction in hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion.
