Online battle: How Ukraine’s cybersecurity experts became citizen soldiers for the digital era

The conflict in Ukraine is the first ever ‘hybrid war’, fought in cyberspace as well as on physical battlefields. Alex Meehan examines the state of play on the cyber front lines

Ukraine’s cyber soldiers: ‘Russian news is broadcasting that the Ukrainian army is bombing Ukrainian cities with missiles, calling our defenders Nazis. But it is not true. That is why our attack targets are Russian propaganda outlets and infrastructure websites’

For Serhii Dovhopoliy, 27, life before the invasion of Ukraine was relatively simple. He lived and worked in Kyiv as a cybersecurity expert, using his skills to carry out stress testing on corporate networks. As a white hat hacker, he was well qualified to help companies harden their networks and make sure they weren’t vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Then the Russian invasion took place and everything changed. Dovhopolyi and his colleagues at the disBalancer security ...