Ukraine鈥檚 highly touted 鈥渉acktivist鈥� army abandoned cyber offensives against Russia just weeks after the war began, and ultimately achieved very little, a new analysis has revealed.
at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues analysed the number of cyberattacks launched against Russian and Ukrainian targets in the first six months of 2022 to examine the evolution of the cyberwar between the two nations.
The researchers used global databases tracking the number of websites defaced by hackers and how many distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were launched. They also monitored discussions from a Telegram channel called the IT Army of Ukraine that was used to coordinate pro-Ukraine hackers.
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Tracking the data in advance of Russia鈥檚 invasion of Ukraine on 24 February allowed the researchers to see the impact it had on the number of cyberattacks launched against each country. It had been feared that Russia鈥檚 offensive could trigger a massive cyberwar.
The day before the invasion, defacement attacks against Russian websites accounted for 0.75 per cent of all such attacks recorded online that day. On the day the war began, this leapt to more than 15 per cent of all attacks. DDoS attacks against Russian targets began to spike six days after the invasion, continuing at roughly that level for three weeks.
But after this point, DDoS attacks returned to a similar level to the pre-war baseline. The number of defacement attacks went back to normal even more quickly: two weeks after the huge spike in attacks, the number had returned largely to pre-invasion levels.
In all, the team tracked 281,000 defacement attacks, 1.7 million DDoS attacks and more than 440 announcements on the Telegram group, along wtith 58,000 replies.
The researchers write in their paper that that defacements by hackers were 鈥渢he rough equivalent of breaking into a disused shopping centre on the outskirts of a mid-sized Russian city and spraypainting 鈥楶utin Sux鈥� on the walls鈥�. They added: 鈥淭hese are trivial acts of solidarity, teenage competition, and expressive delinquency, not a contribution to the armed conflict in any real sense.鈥�
鈥淭his article confirms my initial scepticism about the prevailing narrative of the Ukrainian IT army being a game changer in the cyber dimension of this conflict,鈥� says at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. 鈥淲hen it was first announced, there were few indications that this army had capabilities to conduct any strategically significant cyber operations 鈥� especially on short notice, and without any clear organisational structure.鈥�
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