David Kirichenko
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, cyberattacks have become a routine part of the conflict. Helping lead Ukraine’s cyber offensives is the IT Army of Ukraine, a decentralized hacking force that has launched relentless cyber offensives against Russia’s digital infrastructure. In June 2024, the group claimed responsibility for the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in history, crippling Russian banks and disrupting financial networks. But as the war drags on, the IT Army faces a new challenge: how to scale its operations without relying on traditional recruitment methods.
Formed in response to Russia’s invasion from Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, the IT Army quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The attacks carried out by Ukraine’s IT Army rely on a simple tactic: DDoS attacks. These attacks work by flooding a target—such as a website, server, or network—with an overwhelming amount of traffic, rendering it slow, unresponsive, or completely offline.
On their Telegram channel, the IT Army advertises that the “IT ARMY Kit is a simple and effective tool for cyber resistance against Russian aggression.”
To execute a DDoS attack at scale, hackers typically form a botnet—a network of computers and devices that work together to bombard the target with requests. In the case of the IT Army, volunteers contribute their own computing power, effectively turning thousands of individual machines into a coordinated digital weapon. The more devices involved, the more difficult it becomes for the target to withstand the attack.
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