A Ukrainian hacker tells us about his cyber war against Russia

Lviv - Italianized as Lviv, named in honor of Lev, son of King Danilo of Galicia and founded in 1256, Lviv is a city with a strong western vocation, where the scent of coffee and chocolate blends perfectly with the architecture that recalls the Parisian buildings, the Neapolitan districts. In recent weeks his spirit has been attacked, undermined by a war that threatens to erase his memories: the ancient statues of the historic center have been protected with sandbags, the windows of the cathedrals hermetically sealed with iron sheets.

The collective imagination sees war fought exclusively by guns and tanks, by bombs and violence. In the rear, on the other hand, in the silent suburbs, there are those in this Lion City who fight without guns, using technology to prevent their Oblas't (the name given to the equivalent of our Italian regions in Ukraine) from being destroyed by explosions. The weapons? cunning, intelligence and computers.

This is the story of Roman, an invented name, a very young hacker who code after code, string upon string, attacks Russian computer systems every day. He could not reinforce the ranks of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his call to arms was denied due to health problems.

At the moment, there are six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand hackers in the world committed against Russian President Vladimir Putin, says Roman. And then, in pure Anonymous language: "We do not forgive, we do not forget" ("We do not forgive, we do not forget"). Roman heads a congregation of about fifty Ukrainian IT experts who overload the servers of Russian companies and services on a daily basis.

How Ukraine is setting up an army of hackers In response to the invasion of Russia and cyber attacks, Kyiv responds by recruiting cyber experts, collecting cryptocurrency donations and a battle against Moscow's disinformation Read The article Their war fires large-caliber shots at strategic targets, such as Sberbank, the Russian banking giant which is one of the most important institutions in the world, or the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). But also war factories and communication systems, essential for logistics and troop procurement. The flow of information extrapolated to the enemy is of vital importance for the Ukrainian army in camouflage uniform engaged in the field, it helps to predict the enemy's moves, to understand where the artillery might hit or move.

From his modest room between laptops, posters and keyboards that he uses to compose techno music one can deduce what his passions were before the outbreak of the war. Now keyboards no longer make electronic music but Roman studies all day anyway. He thinks, calculates and learns the vulnerabilities of the enemy and his websites to infect, knock out servers, and cause massive damage to IT infrastructures. He too wants to fight the war, he confides in us his list of trophies and shows us numbers, many numbers; banks, communications, secret services.