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Crowdsourcing Cyber Attacks: Responding to a New Cyber Strategy
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Cyberattacks as a tool of war, conflict, and/or geopolitical competition have exploded over the last decade. In 2015, the Russian cybermilitary unit “Sandworm” exploited vulnerabilities in the Ukrainian power grid to take it completely offline, depriving customers in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast of power for one to six hours. In 2017, over 150 million credit files held by the Equifax reporting bureau were compromised, with the United States government implicating members of the Chinese military in the breach. Russian state-backed hacking groups were also implicated in the 2020 attack on the United States federal government, and most recently, repeated attacks on the Ukrainian government prior to the February 2022 invasion.
However, Ukraine may be the first country to crowdsource cyberattacks. A few days after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov asked for “digital talents” to join a Telegram channel for the country’s “IT army,” aimed at coordinating cyberattacks on Russian targets. Unlike the secretive Sandworm unit, any individual with an account on the messaging app Telegram could join through the…
