A pro-Ukraine activist based in Russia has been sentenced to three years in a prison colony for launching cyberattacks on its Ministry of Defense in opposition to the war.
Yevgeny Kotikov, an IT specialist, was found guilty by a court in Rostov of launching what were likely distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the dedicated website of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
DDoS attacks occur when a threat actor assembles a ‘zombie’ army of computers by remotely controlling them and uses this to overwhelm a target system or, in this case, website, to shut it down.
Kotikov appears to have been motivated by a conscientious objection to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24th last year. It has seen an estimated tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and killed and millions displaced from their homes.
The case was reported by Russian news agency Tass, citing the country’s foremost military intelligence agency the FSB. It should be stressed that judicial independence and press freedom are widely believed to be close to non-existent in Russia, where referring to the invasion of Ukraine as a “war” is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Bearing that in mind, it may seem that Kotikov got off relatively ‘lightly’ by Russian standards. However, prison “colony settlements” — originating alongside the Soviet gulag system during the Communist era — are notorious for harsh conditions, which have been criticized by human rights groups and former inmates alike.
According to anecdotal reports from both of these parties, inmates are subjected to forced labor, sleep deprivation, and squalid conditions, with lack of sanitation, bullying, and humiliation commonplace.
Kotikov has also been ordered to pay the Russian state an 800,000 ruble ($10,000) fine. The computer he is said to have used in the DDoS attacks was confiscated by the FSB.
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