As soldiers and civilians in Ukraine continue to resist an invasion by Russian troops, a very different kind of warfare is being fought on a separate front: the Internet. Hours after Russian troops attacked towns and government facilities in Ukraine, hackers, some of them who claimed to be affiliated with the underground group known as Anonymous – sued a number of Russian government sites and systems. While some of these cyberattacks appeared to be designed only to cause contrarietyothers were aimed at blocking the operational capabilities of the Russian government, or reveal what military intelligence officials in Russia might know. The battle also saw Russia attempt to hack into news networks, using propaganda and disinformation on social and traditional media.

Some of the cyber hacking attempts were prompted by the Ukrainian government itself. Beginning Thursday morning, posts began appearing on various hacker forums asking for volunteers to protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber missions against Russia, according to a Reuters report. The messages call on the “Ukrainian cyber community” to “get involved in the cyber defense of our country” and invite hackers to apply via Google docs. Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters a senior Ministry of Defense official asked him to write the messages.

Pro-Ukrainian hacker groups have also come together to launch various attacks against Russian infrastructure and command systems, Reported Policy. And a group known as Belarusian cyberpartisan, Belarus-based “hacktivists” who oppose the Russian invasion, say they have created a tactical organization to help Ukraine’s military struggle against Russia. The group asserted in January, before the recent Russian invasions, that he had encrypted parts of the computer systems used by the state railway in Belarus, in an attempt to slow down the movement of Russian troops by rail.

Ukrainian officials hope that hackers and cybersecurity experts could protect the country’s critical infrastructure from Russian hackers, a more than theoretical concern. In 2015, a cyber attack crippled Ukrainian power plants and left 225,000 Ukrainians without electricity; many believe hackers affiliated with the Russian government caused the outage. In 2017, on the eve of Ukrainian Constitution Day, a ransomware attack that came to be known as NotPetya has caused approximately $10 billion in damage worldwide, and, according to analysts, was concentrated in Ukraine.

The consensus between a number of countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, is that Russia was behind NotPetya, which leveraged a sort of attack the US National Security Agency in the United States has used in the past. (The methods of attack were disclosed in 2017.) Last week, malware (which infects computers and then wipes them of their data)was found on a number of critical systems in Ukraine, including those of several government agencies and a financial institution. Russia is suspected to be behind the cyberattack.

In terms of attacks and defensive measures in social media, Russia’s state censor announced late last week that it would start to reduce access to Facebook because the social network limited the reach of Russian media, according to Kevin Rothrock, an editor with independent Russian media Meduza, based in Latvia. Over the weekend, YouTube announced that Russia Today, the state media, stop being allowed to monetize its content on the video-sharing network, and that Russian media will not be allowed to advertise on other Google services, such as Gmail.

There are also social media accounts fulfilling a different role that is common in wartime: profiteering. Taylor Lorenz wrote for Contribution review on a wave of Instagram accounts who have published misinformation about the conflict in Ukraine, not because they work for Russia or Ukraine, or even because they care about the specifics of the conflict, but because they want to go viral, so to generate as much ad revenue as possible. “What I’m trying to do is get as many subscribers as possible using my platform and skills,” the @livefromukraine and @POVwarfare admin said. said to Lorenz.

Learn more about the Russia/Ukraine conflict:

• Intelligence: The Harvard Gazette spoke with Lauren Zabierek, former Air Force intelligence officer and current director of the Cyber ​​Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, on Russia’s cyber warfare capabilities, and what a cyber attack on the United States might look like. “We have no indication of an immediate attack,” she said, “but we do know that the Russians have at least been conducting reconnaissance against our critical infrastructure for years and may have implanted some sort of tools to impact these services in response to U.S. or allied foreign policy action.
• Free tools: Runa Sandvik, security analyst who has worked with journalists at New York Times and the Press Freedom Foundation, proposed on Twitter to give all journalists in Ukraine, free virtual private network accounts allowing them to access the Internet anonymously. And FlokiNET, a Finland-based hosting service that claims to provide a safe haven for activists and whistleblowers, offered its tools to journalists as well as.
• Demystify: Renee DiResta, head of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said on Twitter that “The proliferation of video content purporting to come from conflict zones is a challenge for debunkers, but nearly impossible for mainstream audiences. Reverse image search not working well [and] it’s essentially impossible to do from an app like TikTok. Jared Holt and Sam Thielman mount an edition of their newsletter with links to reliable sources of information on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including Bellingcat and Jane Lytvynenko from Harvard’s Shorestein Center.

Other Notable Stories:

• The European Union said on Sunday it would ban the media Russia today and Sputnik, according to a report by Variety. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU would ban “the Kremlin’s media machine” and that RT and Sputnik, along with their affiliates, could no longer “spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and sow division in our union.” Von der Leyen also said the EU was developing tools to “ban toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe.” In Great Britain, RT East under review by the country’s media regulatorand he was suspended in Australia on Saturday.
• CNN has determined that Allison Gollust, the network’s former chief marketing officer, provided advice to then-anchor Chris Cuomo as he tried to help New York Governor Andrew Cuomo deal with allegations of sexual misconduct. the the wall street journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Gollust, who quit CNN last week“denied offering advice to Andrew Cuomo and said the idea that his communications with Chris Cuomo could be considered as such was ‘patently ridiculous’.”
• Vice wrote about Elena Chernenko, a journalist with the Moscow daily KommersantWHO woke up on Friday to find that his access to government officials had suddenly been revoked. “His crime? Publication of an open letter not criticizing the government but expressing its opposition to the war. More than 280 other journalists signed Chernenko’s letter, some of whom are employed directly by the Kremlin at state news agencies.
• The International Coalition of Investigative Journalists has helped create a partnership of over 30 media companies in 22 countries to investigate leaked Ericsson documentswhich, according to the ICIJ, “detail alleged corrupt practices in 15 countries, including Iraq, where the Swedish telecommunications giant may have made payments to ISIS.”
• Kyle Pope, editor of CJR, wrote that the crisis in Ukraine forces the news media – and cable news, in particular – to break their worst habits. “We are facing days, if not weeks and months, of horrific stories and images outside of Europe,” he wrote. “The crisis in Ukraine will test newsrooms around the world to avoid grandstanding, avoid nationalism, reward reporting on the ground and limit what we say to what we know. That might just be too much to ask; in some cases, it already is. But at this point, at the beginning of this terrible war, some of our biggest newsrooms are passing the test.
• Brian Stelter reports that Chris Licht, a producer whose credits include “Morning Joe,” “CBS This Morning” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” has been tapped to lead CNN once Discovery merges with WarnerMedia this spring. citing three sources with knowledge of the plan. Licht is currently executive vice president of special programming at ViacomCBS.
• Facebook fails to label climate change misinformation as such, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a UK watchdog group. The center reviewed a small sample of English-language articles related to climate change from editors the group had previously named in its “Toxic Ten” group, reports Nieman Lab. “In November 2021, CCHR discovered that this group of 10 websites – including Breitbart, Newsmax and the Daily Wire – were responsible for nearly 70% of engagement with climate denial content.”

Mathew Ingram is CJR’s Chief Digital Editor. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the early days of the commercial Internet. His writings have been published in the Washington Post and the FinancialTimes as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.

TOP IMAGE: The Ukrainian flag displayed on a laptop screen and binary code displayed on a screen are seen in this multiple exposure illustrative photo taken in Krakow, Poland on February 16, 2022. (Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)