You're reading: Cyber warrior steps up effort to help in war with Russia

Yevhen Dokukin, a web security auditor from Kyiv, calls himself a blade runner. He has been in the middle of the war with Russia for almost a year, and his battlefield is the cyber world. It turns out, his computer is a pretty effective weapon.

He said his real work with web security started after Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 even though his actual work experience started in 1999. In June Dokukin became a ‘chief commander’ of the Ukrainian Cyber Army – the name he awarded to a loose group of young people he coordinates. The army’s target is Russia-backed separatists in the Internet.

Since June, the group has blocked more than 170 Web Money and PayPal accounts of separatists, freezing some $3 million in cah flows, according to the 31-year-old commander. He says they took down around 40 propaganda websites and have hacked emails of some separatist leaders. Ukrainian Cyber Army also keeps a close eye on some of the terrorists in social networks, as well as pro-Russian fan groups. It also edits Russian Wikipedia pages about Ukraine.

Dokukin speaks very fast and gestures a lot when he discusses achievements of his volunteers, who are mostly of civic activists, programmers and even business people.

There is no shortage of work for the group. Since annexation of Crimea, the cyber warriors took over more than 200 public CCTV cameras on the peninsula, as well as in Donetsk and Luhansk republics. Dokukin also monitors the movement of Russian troops and military vehicles on Ukrainian border.

All this information is then passed on to the Security Service. Sometimes, he said, they used information obtained by hackers.

“But usually they don’t even thank us for that,” he says. They also used to work with the Defense Ministry, but often got no feedback. “They don’t want to analyze the data we leak to them,” Dokukin says. “And I don’t always want to do all the work for them.”

Earlier Ukraine’s Security Service chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said that his agency is sensing the help of the hackers in countering terrorism in Ukraine, and thanked them for cooperation.

Recently Dokukin along his team members started targeting printers. After accessing private Wi-Fi networks, the team was able to print documents on vulnerable printers hooked to internal networks in various offices in Crimea and separatist-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine.

The text that usually appears there is “Slava Ukraini”(Glory to Ukraine!), or a popular line from the chant invented by the Kharkiv football fans insulting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Dokukin does not disclose the exact number of people on his (ever changing) team, but says that half of the cyber warriors are women. Some of them come from the Donbas and occupied Crimea. He also has a couple of foreign activists from Germany and the UK who help from abroad, he says.

“Even though most of my team were lamers (technically illiterate users), but eventually some of them worked out well,” Dokukin explains, adding that he launched some training sessions in December for his team. “There are lots of different assignment we have and I can’t do it all myself – but it’s difficult to find people who know how to do it.”

He confesses that his family does not support his activity, but says he will keep doing this job nevertheless. He gets a real kick out of it and gets annoyed when he is asked why he is doing it.

“I’m doing it for the victory of Ukraine, not for the people per se. I merely have an ideal image of the country in my head,” Dokukin explains.

The web security in Ukraine, according to Dokukin, is in a terrible state and even government websites are riddled with bugs. “But few of them want to spend money on web security experts to fix it.”

Even though he is critically short of free time, Dokukin says he likes playing his digital synthesizer and enjoys classical music. But now he is focused mostly on some key operations in progress. One of those is an attempt to capture and block routers in Crimea and a number of Russian cities.

“The operation is called ‘Apocalypses’,” Dokukin says with a wry smile. “It’s my message to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin – get out of Ukraine or your residents won’t have internet at all.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]