Topics: Ukraine, Technology, Russia
Hundreds of thousands of volunteer coders have banded together to launch a cyber war against Russia.
More than 311,000 people have joined the IT Army Of Ukraine, a group on the social media platform Telegram that aims to wreak havoc on Russian agencies.
People from Ukraine and around the world have signed up to take part in a cyber war to bring down Russian targets.
Members of the clandestine coding group spoke to CNBC, with the CEO of a cybersecurity firm named Nikita detailing to the news outlet what he's been doing on behalf of the IT Army of Ukraine.
Nikita revealed he has been trying to tell Russian citizens what's really happening in Ukraine despite the tight media controls set by the Kremlin.
He and his team are also trying to inflict economic harm by publishing Russian credit card details online.
"I published like 110,000 credit cards in the Telegram channels," he said. "We want them to go to the Stone Age and we are pretty good at this."
The cybersecurity boss revealed they're now launching cyberattacks against Russian gas stations, but did stress he doesn't have ill will against all Russians and is grateful to those defying Moscow in the aid of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian software engineer known only as Dave, explained how he has worked to carry out cyberattacks since the invasion began, targeting Russian government websites, Russian banks and currency exchanges.
"I'm helping the IT Army with running DDoS attacks," he said.
For those that don't know, a DDoS attack - or a distributed denial-of-service attack - disrupts the normal traffic of a website by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic, much like an unexpected traffic jam that clogs up a highway and prevents drivers from reaching their destination.
"I've rented a few servers on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and wrote a bot for myself that just accepts website links and targets attacks at them whenever I paste them in," he told CNBC.
"I'm usually running attacks from 3-5 servers and each server usually produces around 50,000 requests per second."
Last month, Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov called on 'digital talents' to join the army, telling social media users that the fight continues 'on the cyber front'. And it seems many have answered his call.