Ukraine Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted Saturday that Kyiv was “creating an IT army” to “continue to fight on the cyber front” as Russian forces continue their assault on Ukraine.
Fedorov tweeted a link to a channel on the messaging app Telegram that encouraged hackers to conduct cyberattacks on key Russian energy firms and financial firms. The proposed target list includes natural gas giant Gazprom and big Russian banks Sberbank and VTB. The Biden administration sanctioned the two banks on Thursday over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Telegram channel promoted by Fedorov was translated into English to appeal to “all IT specialists from other countries,” the English version said.
Cyberattacks have had a supporting role in the Russia-Ukraine war. A series of so-called distributed denial of service attacks flooded Ukrainian government websites with phony traffic prior to Russia’s invasion.
The White House blamed one of those rounds of hacks on Russia’s GRU military agency (Moscow denied the allegation.).
On Friday, Ukrainian officials accused the Belarusian Ministry of Defense of trying to hack the private email accounts of Ukrainian military personnel. The ministry did not return CNN’s request for comment.
