Working day and night, as reported by Ukrainian news resource TSN.UA, Ukrainian cyber forces and individual pro-Ukrainian hackers have maintained online attacks on all Internet resources linked to insurgents in the eastern part of the country, whom the Kyiv (Kiev) government deems as terrorists.
As of early November, the cyber forces claimed to have downed 46 sites belonging to the breakaway pro-Russian states of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) via multiple denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a method that can slowdown or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests.
Primary targets have included the electoral commission sites of the republics during and after their self-appointed elections for new prime ministers this month, with the LNR site blocked on two separate occasions and the DNR portal temporarily taken offline. The Ukrainian government has denounced the elections as illegal.
The cyber warfare operation, titled “Retribution,” has been ongoing since mid-2014. Last month, pro-Ukrainian hackers leaked secret documents from the DNR, representatives of Russian nationalist organizations in Crimea, and representatives of government agencies from the Russian Federation.
Pro-Ukraine hackers target e-currency accounts
The anti-insurgency cyber campaign has also moved beyond site attacks, with hackers targeting the financial networks of the DNR and LNR.
A hacker at the forefront of pro-Ukraine cyber warfare efforts, Yevgeny Dokunin, has announced on his Facebook page that he managed to convince Russian online payment service Yandex Money to block the e-wallet of a notable group of DNR and LNR supporters last month.
“Via my actions, I managed to stop the financing of terrorism through the Yandex Money system,” noted Dokunin via social media.
However, fellow Russian electronic currency service WebMoney refused to cooperate with his blocking request.
