Category: Information Warfare

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, stares directly into the camera as if he were an amateur YouTuber. He stands alongside high-ranking Ukrainian officials who are also casually dressed, wearing a T-shirt and sweater and naming the official titles of those standing with him. As many unskilled Ukrainian soldiers, including citizens, oppose the Russian forces on the ground, this is only one example of how the country under siege has been fighting the information war against Russia. While Ukraine is an underdog on the ground, it has so far won the war for hearts and minds, notably in regions of Russia where demonstrations have erupted and inside many nations that have gone above and beyond in offering assistance. 

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-is-winning-the-information-war-against-russia.html 

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has set up a special operations center to monitor the conflict in Ukraine, and it launched a feature so users in the country can lock their social media profiles for security, a company official said in Twitter posts on Thursday. With one click, users in Ukraine can lock their profile to prevent users who are not their friends from downloading or sharing their profile picture, or seeing posts on their timeline, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said on Twitter.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/facebook-is-letting-users-ukraine-lock-their-social-profiles-security-2022-02-24/

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense (MoU) and two national banks have been taken offline as a result of ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults, which are widely considered to be the work of Russian hackers. DDoS assaults are still popular among hackers, despite their simplicity, and are frequently employed to disguise more subtle intrusions. As tensions with Russia continue to escalate, researchers believe this may be the case with the Ukraine situation. DDoS assaults began yesterday, crippling MoU’s online system as well as the web infrastructure of two large Ukrainian banks, PrivatBank and Oschadbank. The assaults on the national banks were verified by the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security. 

Source: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/ukraine-ddos-attacks 

The grim concerns from America about the potential Russian aggression of Ukraine have continued in recent days. The scenario in Russia, on the other hand, is rather different. Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, described the US evaluations as craziness and scare tactics, dismissing them as “propaganda.” Russian state television portrays Ukraine as the offender in the stalemate, reporting in recent days that the former Soviet republic is preparing to assault ethnic Russians in the country’s east, misinformation that the West fears might be used as a pretext for a Russian invasion. Many individuals are unclear what to believe because of conflicting stories about the likelihood of a Russian invasion. 

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/with-russian-troops-poised-on-the-border-with-ukraine-information-warfare-has-already-begun-100007423.html 

Boldend, a firm based in San Diego, has kept a modest profile since its inception in 2017. Though it has gotten little attention, it was included in the New York Times last weekend, right at the conclusion of an article about the troubled Israeli spyware firm NSO Group. According to a presentation provided to defense major Raytheon, Boldend created a capacity to infiltrate WhatsApp, albeit it was shut off in a security upgrade in January 2021. It was the first time its “cyber warfare” technology had been exposed to the public outside of a collaboration with Raytheon declared in 2020, in which the two companies said they would work collaboratively to create automated products that boost the development and implementation of cyber tools for operations and functions vital to national security. 

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/02/01/billionaire-facebook-investor-peter-thiel-secretly-funded-a-cyber-warfare-startup-that-hacked-whatsapp/?sh=3cfb27e95600