The cyber experts managed to get the military to send them photos that were later geolocated. Shortly after, a Russian base in the Ukraine was bombed.
It is always said that modern wars will increasingly be decided in cyberspace. A sign that some of this is already a reality was given by an article published by the Financial Times that ensures that a group of Ukrainian hackers created false profiles of beautiful women with whom they contacted Russian soldiers, tricking them into sending them photographs that they later geolocated. .
As soon as the hackers managed to determine where the invaders were in Ukraine, they alerted the Ukrainian forces, who on at least one occasion destroyed Russian combat material.
One of the interviewees is Nikita Knysh, a 30-year-old professional from Kharkov who decided to use his knowledge and that of his cybersecurity firm HackControl to help his country. He gathered other hackers and together they founded Hackyourmom. One of his last high-impact actions was the deception of Russian soldiers, contacted through Russian networks, Facebook and Telegram.
Thanks to the false profiles of beautiful women, they managed to get the invaders to send them information that allowed them to be located. “The Russians are anxious,” Knysh told the Financial Times. “They send a lot of trash to the girls to show that they are warriors,” he explains. With the photos, they were able to identify the position of the soldiers at a Russian base near Melitopol, in southern Ukraine.
The hackers gave that information to the Ukrainian armed forces, and soon after the base was attacked. They found out about the bombing on television. “My first thought was that I am being useful to my country,” said another Hackyourmom member. “Now I want to do more and more, I want to find more bases, again and again,” he adds. The Financial Times says that it was able to verify some of the hackers’ claims, such as that they had Russian security cameras tapped, but in other cases they did not have enough information to verify them.
The Ukrainian digital media Ukrainian Pravda reported a month ago that there was an explosion at a military base in Melitopol. Other hacks Hackyourmom has claimed include the release of data from Russian military contractors, diverting numerous Russian flights via a flood of bomb threats, and tricking Russian TV stations into showing footage of the war.
Another hack, this time attributed to Anonymous, caused dozens of taxis to arrive on September 1 at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, one of the main avenues in Moscow and where the Hotel Ukraine is located. Everything indicates that the cyberattackers intervened the service of the Yandex Taxi company, sending the vehicles to that busy avenue, generating a gigantic traffic jam.