Ukraine’s hackers: an ex-spook, a Starlink and ‘owning’ Russia

Within hours of Russia invading Ukraine, Nikita Knysh rushed to join the resistance.

He went to the Kharkiv office of his old employer, the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU), and begged for an assignment.

But the city, only 30km from the Russian border, was in chaos. Leaving empty-handed the 30-year-old IT professional, an ex-hacker, realised he would have to create his own mission.

He moved the employees of his cyber security company, HackControl, and an array of computer equipment into the basement of a wallet factory. As the Russian army pounded Kharkiv, Knysh’s team started hacking Russia.

Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine unleashed an unprecedented cyber war, with legions of hackers on both sides. Dozens of government-sponsored groups took advantage of the tumult to target their opponents, as did criminal gangs, hiding behind the noise to conduct ransomware heists.

Ukraine’s prewar IT industry, with 300,000 professionals working in cyber security or outsourced back offices, proved to be a crucial pool of talent in the world’s first large-scale cyber war.

Six months into the conflict, tales of the hacks they inflicted on Russian companies and the Russian government have bounced around the internet. But with anonymous groups claiming overlapping credit for “pwning” — online slang for “owning” — Russia, separating truth from braggadocio is often impossible.

Not all of Knysh’s claims can be verified, but the Financial Times spoke to government officials and fellow hackers who vouched for him and reviewed photographs, videos and log files that backed up some of his assertions.

His story is a tale of talented programmers forced to adapt to the turmoil of war. It involves the recruitment of low-level criminals into crowds of coders, hoax bomb scares, the large-scale infiltration of internet-connected security cameras to surveil Russian-occupied territory, and honey-trapping Russian soldiers into revealing their bases.

But first the group, nicknamed Hackyourmom, needed a base of its own. The wallet factory was good for the first week, when Knysh dusted off an old trick from his SBU days — spoofing his way as an…