Ihor has two MacBooks: “One I use for work and the other for attacking Russian websites,” he told me cheerfully. The 30-year-old, who wouldn’t tell me his surname, lives in Lviv in western Ukraine and works as a product manager for Jooble, a Ukrainian website that helps people around the world “find the job of their dreams”.
We met in Veronika’s, one of the only cafés still open in the centre of the city, before heading to his apartment. Ihor was dressed like a superhero in a tracksuit made by a friend to Ihor’s own design: orange with a triangular chest panel decorated with blue galaxies and red devil horns sewn onto the hood. “I like orange, and it’s comfortable.”
Like all Ukrainians in these desperate days, Ihor talked rapidly as he described the kind of hacking he does. “It’s a standard DDoS, [distributed denial of service] attack. It’s not rocket science.” The idea is to get as many machines as possible to access a single Russian or Belarusian website at the same time, causing it to crash.
The hit-list includes everything from the Central Bank of Russia and the National Bank of Belarus, to Interfax, the Russian state newswire and the Kremlin. They’re also targeting Russian-backed media in Donetsk and Luhansk, the self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine. Ihor and his fellow hackers, who work together through Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, have installed software on their computers which spew out multiple requests to the website in question.
Hackers have developed software for people with poor tech skills. “Everyone can do it”
Most Russian websites have blocked Ukrainian users to prevent these kinds of attacks, so the hackers have to mask their location using a VPN (virtual private network). On Ihor’s laptop screen, I watched as a green line arced like a virtual missile from the Balkans to Russia. “That attack is [supposedly] coming from Serbia,” said Ihor, laughing. (Serbia has close ties with Russia, though to some people’s surprise, it voted to condemn the invasion at the United Nations General Assembly on March 2nd.)
On Ihor’s computer white code containing the IP addresses of the websites being hacked scrolled up a black screen. When hackers succeed in crashing a site, the line of code is replaced by a victory message: “Russian warship go fuck yourself!” The phrase, uttered by the Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island in the Black Sea when ordered by the Russians to surrender, has become the country’s battle cry.
The number of hackers is growing all the time. There are more than 300,000 members of the official “IT Army” of Ukraine, a Telegram group of volunteer cyber-warriors set up by the government, and an increasing number of unofficial groups. Some hackers are developing idiot-proof software for people with poor tech skills. “Everyone can do it,” said Ihor. Because the software is automated, you don’t even need to be awake. Ihor uses a program called Amphetamine that keeps his MacBook on overnight. “So websites are crashing while I sleep. I love it!”
Hackers attack hundreds of websites a day. Some sites go down in a few seconds, others take several hours. Russian sites often change their IP addresses to try to avoid being a target, but the Telegram groups soon find the new ones. Then they hit them again.
Ihor is delighted when that works, and enjoys reading social-media posts from frustrated Russians. The idea, he said, was not to destroy the entire Russian banking system or suspend all government services, but to disrupt everyday life in Russia so much that it feels like nothing is working and “creates a kind of panic in the country”.
Jooble, the recruitment site that Ihor works for, was founded in Ukraine in 2007 and now has 90m monthly users worldwide. Roman Prokofiev, 36, one of the co-founders, spoke to me on the phone one evening from western Ukraine. He told me that four hours after Russia invaded, the company mothballed its sites in Belarus and Russia and posted news about the war on their homepages. Since the invasion, more than 1.5m people have visited these sites, he said.
The Russian and Belarusian markets were important to Jooble, but money is not the object of the business anymore. For now, the revenue from its websites in North America and Europe is keeping Jooble stable, said Prokofiev, but many employees are demoralised and exhausted. He is in the process of setting up an office in Poland, where 26 of the female staff are now based, having managed to get out of Ukraine. (Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to leave the country.)
“This war is a consequence of the info wars, so we need to win the info war to stop it”
Prokofiev has spent every day since the war began trying to help Jooble’s 500 staff in Ukraine reach safety. He told me that 95% were fine, although many were still in Kyiv and finding it difficult to work since they keep having to run down to shelters during bombardments. Others have gone to villages where there was no internet connection; some are pinned down in cities without electricity. Prokofiev hasn’t been able to find 17 of his employees; he can only hope that they are alive, just unable to communicate.
A banner on all Jooble’s websites urges users to donate money to the Ukrainian army (Jooble itself has given $200,000). Jooble’s developers have set up two websites: one has more information about how international users can help Ukraine; the other encourages Ukrainians to write to friends and relatives of Russian soldiers and try to convince them of the folly of Putin’s invasion.
Prokofiev’s colleagues are spamming Russian and Belarusian email addresses with information about the war. “I signed up for the Jooble mailing list,” one Russian emailed in response to a missive from the website. “Every day, vacancies used to come to my email, but now when I open them, I see anti-war messages with calls for rallies. When I click ‘unsubscribe’ I get the same messages again.”
“This war is a consequence of the info wars,” Prokofiev told me, referring to Russian propaganda that frames the invasion as a peacekeeping operation to rescue Russian-speakers from a supposedly Nazi Ukrainian regime, “so we need to win the info war to stop it”.
Russia’s government has made it a crime to describe its activities in Ukraine as an “invasion” or “war”. Most foreign correspondents have left Russia. Netflix has gone dark; Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google, which owns YouTube, have suspended ad sales to Russian customers; the Russian government has blocked Facebook and restricted Twitter.
Prokofiev is worried that Russia could now seal itself off from the world and stop its citizens from accessing the internet beyond state-sanctioned sites. “It sounds incredible, but ten days ago I would never have believed there would be a war. Now I can believe anything can happen.”
In the past few days Jooble has adapted its info-war tactics, trying to persuade the Russians to oppose the invasion, if not for the sake of Ukrainians, then for the sake of their children’s economic future. “This message works better,” said Prokofiev. “We can tell by their answers, which are softer, Some even thank us for giving them information.”
Ukrainians are doing whatever they can. The whole country is mobilised in the war effort. In many cases, there is no longer much distinction between the aims of individuals, private companies and the state. For Ihor, disrupting Russian websites is just one front of many. He is trying to get his girlfriend and her daughter to Hungary (“I’ve given her my crypto-wallet, access to my bank accounts.”) His parents, youngest sister and brother are in Kherson in the south, a city occupied by the Russians. They have electricity, he said, but the mobile-phone networks are down, local markets are taking only cash and his father, who owns a printing company, has just 500 hryvnias ($17) left in his pocket.
Ihor has taken in refugees from eastern Ukraine to his one-bedroom apartment. A few days before, a couple arrived with a newborn baby, as well as a man who had just taken his family to the Polish border and a family from Kharkiv that included a pregnant woman. “So we had –”, Ihor counted on his fingers, “seven and a half people staying.” He slept in the dining room.
And Ihor still has his day job, testing Jooble out in a new European market. “We have to keep working to support our families, and be able to send money to the Ukrainian army,” he said, smiling through it all. “And I am doing yoga every day.” It helps him feel less mortal. ■
Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. She is sending regular dispatches for 1843 magazine from Ukraine. You can read her previous dispatches, and the rest of our coverage of the war, here
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHIEN-CHI CHANG