The war in Ukraine was less than two days old when Mykhailo Fedorov grabbed his smartphone.
He mobilized a force that actually didn't even exist.
After the barely 31-year-old Ukrainian digital minister had called on large tech companies such as Apple, Google and Meta via Twitter to ban all Russian users from the platforms and cut all connections to neighboring enemy countries, he called for the formation of an IT army.
A kind of international brigade made up of programmers, hackers and software specialists.
Stephen Finsterbusch
Editor in Business.
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Thiemo Heeg
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It is said to now have 290,000 volunteers.
At their side are experienced hacktivists like those from Anonymous.
They operate behind the actual battle lines in the depths of the Russian networks.
It is not clear who they are and where they come from.
A shadow army in virtual space.
Their actions are controlled from a commanding height on the messaging service Telegram.
From there, the cyber partisans get instructions, orders and coordinates of potential targets.
Their task: to attack and eliminate Russia's technical infrastructure - military and civilian.
The Russians have already suffered some casualties.
Websites of companies, authorities and institutions were down;
in gas and oil companies, computers would not boot;
Ministries and TV channels were not connected;
Weapons manufacturers failed digital control systems in machines and systems.
The situation is unclear, hardly anything can be verified, much is in the dark on the cyber front, and that is a problem – not only for Moscow.
150 cyber incidents in the first few days
"From a legal point of view, the threshold values from which one can speak of a cyberwar in the sense of a war are relatively high and also very controversial," says Dennis-Kenji Kipker, Professor of IT Security Law at the Bremen University of Applied Sciences.
One cannot assume that when Anonymous declares cyber war, it is actually cyber war.
"In normal situations, nobody would publicly call for crimes, and no foreign actor, no private individual can now rise up and say: In the situation, to show solidarity, I publicly call for crimes to be committed, for example against another population.
You have to be very careful how you describe the whole thing and make the distinction.”
Matthias Schulze from the Science and Politics Foundation says: “One aspect is that what is decisive for the war is the physical on-site.
And the second aspect: The question of whether something can be hacked is not the relevant one, because everything can be hacked where a computer is connected.
The questions that become relevant at the end are: How likely is that, and who can gain something from it?
And then we ask about cost-benefit and such considerations.” By the middle of last week, 150 so-called incidents were counted.
But the hard cyber war is still to come.
"As a private person, you should not intervene"
Thorsten Holz from the Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken agrees.
There have not yet been any attacks by secret services that have switched off large areas of infrastructure.
But that could change quickly.
Russia in particular has the ability to do this.
"I can only recommend everyone not to participate in Anonymous and Co. because it is unclear what the consequences will be," says Holz.
"It's a conflict that's being carried out at a very high level, and as a private individual you shouldn't intervene." Sebastian Artz from the digital association Bitkom explains: "There's no reason to panic, but with Russia's war of aggression it's also in German cyberspace full attention and the greatest possible vigilance from all companies, organizations and government agencies is required.” Especially since the Ukrainians are staying on the digital trigger.
Before the Russian invasion, there were around 200,000 IT specialists and 4,000 tech companies in the invaded country.
Many of them are still there.
Most Ukrainian tech specialists are young and male - and are therefore not allowed to leave the country.
Your branch is the fastest growing industry in Ukraine.
Up until the invasion, they earned around 5 billion dollars a year.
Companies like EPAM, Softserve or Intellias recorded annual growth rates of 50 percent.
With Bitfury, People.ai, Grammarly and Gitlab, Ukraine even has four start-ups with a market value of more than one billion dollars.
The Digital Ministry was founded in 2019 to develop this scene.
But that is now in a completely different role.
Crypto donations and NFTs
The IT army proclaimed by Digital Minister Fedorov after the Russian invasion may be large, but it is organized like a partisan squad: mobile and motivated, clear goals, small units.
Prize money will be offered to find gaps in Russian IT systems.
The hackers are smuggled into the hostile networks.
They are supposed to manipulate or destroy the systems.
Fedorow also relies on virtuality for financing.
He called on the global IT scene to donate in cryptocurrency.
So far, $50 million worth of Bitcoin, Tether, Polkadot, and Solana have been received.
A third of this sum has already been spent on weapons, helmets, food, medicine and bandages.
In a next step, Kyiv is now working on so-called NFTs.
So far, these digital proof certificates are mainly known from the art market.
In mid-March they are to serve as proof of donations to finance the war.