After Ukraine recruits an “IT Army,” dozens of Russian sites go dark

Cyberspace is feeling the strain of Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine: multiple sites tied to the Kremlin and its allies in Belarus have been unavailable to all or at least major parts of the Internet in recent days.

The outages began last week with the defacement of Russian websites and picked up steam over the weekend, following a call from Ukraine’s vice prime minister for the formation of an “IT Army” to target Russian interests.

A call to arms

“There will be tasks for everyone,” Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote. “We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists.”

The task list included 31 organizations affiliated with the Kremlin, Russian banks and corporations, and Belarus. Targets also include Russian government agencies, government IP addresses, government storage devices and mail servers, and support for critical infrastructure. For a time, the popular Russian search engine and email portal, Yandex, was also rendered unavailable.

Websites for many of the listed organizations—including banks (Gazprombank), companies (Sberbank), corporations (Russian Copper Company and Lukoil), and government websites (Moscow State Services and the Ministry of Defense)—were unavailable at the time this post went live.

The Cyberpolice of Ukraine, meanwhile, reported on Sunday that IT working on behalf of the country had successfully blocked web surfers from reaching a host of high-profile Russian sites.

Currently down

“Cyber ​​specialists carry out massive cyber attacks on the web resources of Russia and Belarus,” the post stated. “The website of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the FSB of the Russian Federation, Sberbank, and other important government and critical information systems for the Russian Federation and Belarus are currently down.”