Civilian Ukrainian hackers are conducting a form of counterespionage by locating and identifying people that are assisting Russian forces with intelligence from inside the country, Ukrainian legislator Oleksiy Goncharenko claimed on his Telegram account.
The hackers uncovered correspondence between pro-Russian activists in the recently captured southern city of Kherson, said Goncharenko, a member of the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine's congress] and founder of the Goncharenko Center of Education and Culture.
The hackers were able to penetrate a Ukrainian separatist community in the social network called V Kontakte, the biggest in Russia with more than 500 million accounts, which was banned in Ukraine in 2017.
Goncharenko's post included numerous screenshots of the correspondence between the pro-Russian separatists.
One of those identified in the posts "has been ordered to gather intelligence on pro-Ukrainian activists. Other operations included the photographing and video-taping of Ukrainian military equipment, the number of soldiers, their movements and exact geo-locations," Goncharenko wrote.
One screenshot showed a series of messages that were exchanged between the pro-Russian activists right before the capture of Kherson.
"We will be in Kherson tomorrow," it reads. "We need information on the 'Nazis' that are active in the city. We have to capture the people that spread information and the ones that agitate people to protest. We'll capture the rest later!"
Another screenshot identified the exact locations of Ukrainian armed forces' positions.
Another post showed a map of Ukraine designating territories captured by Russia. The map appeared to conflict with information generally reported by news outlets.
Other cyber groups also have launched asymmetrical attacks.
"The hacking collective #Anonymous today hacked into the Russian streaming services Wink and Ivi (like Netflix) and live TV channels Russia 24, Channel One, Moscow 24 to broadcast war footage from Ukraine," a tweet from the group said.
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