Ukraine detains hacker who allegedly aided Russian military

A hacker provided the occupiers with mobile communications in Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine said (SSU).

“With this collaborator, the enemy: made anonymous phone calls from Russia to the mobile phones of the invaders in Ukraine; sent SMS to Ukrainian security officers and civil servants with proposals to surrender and side with the occupiers; passed commands and instructions to advanced groups of Russian invaders,” SSU said.

The detained hacker allegedly helped make up to thousand calls in one day — many of them were coming from the top leadership of the enemy army.

The SSU provided several photos of the hacker and his equipment but did not release any information identifying the hacker.

He will be held accountable for ‘all the severity of the law.’

According to Interfax news agency, after the Ukrainian telecommunications operators had cut off the communications of the Russian military, blocking the access of phones with Russian numbers to their networks, Russians began to steal phones from Ukrainians to stay in touch with their counterparts.

Russian invasion

On the night of February 24, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. The Kremlin dubbed the aggression a 'special operation,' and calling the attack a 'war' can lead to a 15-year sentence.

In light of the attack, the hacker community started rallying to help Ukrainians. With Anonymous being the most prominent one, numerous hacker groups and researchers partake in various campaigns to help Ukraine.

Cyber activists targeted Russian state-controlled media outlets TASS, Kommersant, Izvestia, Fontanka, and RBC, pushing them offline.

Russian nuclear agency Rosatom and the country's space agency Roscosmos were allegedly breached by hacktivists protesting the war in Ukraine.

The German branch of the Anonymous collective also claims to have stolen 20 terabytes of data from the German arm of Rosneft, Russia's state energy company.

The Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine prompted Western governments to sanction Russia. As a result, numerous IT-related services got blocked or left the Russian market after the invasion began.

According to the United Nations, over 2.8 million people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have perished due to Russia's artillery attacks of urban territories.

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