Hackers are helping ukraine win its battle against internet trolls

Hackers at the Cyber Berkut group want to help Ukraine dispel the myth of Russian invincibility. For years Moscow has been controlling its image thanks to a digital machine named Internet troll. But now Cyber Berkut, an independent hacker organization, is battling back and protecting freedom all over the world.

Markiyan matsekh

Markiyan Matsekh is a hacker and activist from Kharkiv, Ukraine. He has been helping Ukraine fight its online propaganda war by developing tools to protect the country's online infrastructure against cyberattacks. In Ukraine, we have a lot of problems with fake news and trolls spreading lies and propaganda on social media.

We wanted to create something that could help us fight back. So I started creating tools that would allow us to protect our country from these kinds of attacks. One of the first things I did was build an algorithm that searches for posts with Russian language text and then identifies those posts as Russian-language bots or trolls.

It's like a virus scanner for social media accounts. The next thing we did was build an application called "StopFake", which allows users to report fake news stories on Facebook. After that, we created an app called "UAT" (Ukrainian Army Today), which provides information about Ukraine's military operations in Donbas region (eastern Ukraine).

This app contains updates from official sources like Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ukrainian General Staff.

Hackers

Hackers are helping Ukraine win its battle against internet trolls Ukrainian hackers have developed a tool that helps the government and media fight against Russian propaganda. The project was launched after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which sparked a war between Kiev and Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The project, called StopFake, has been operating since 2015 and is run by volunteers in cooperation with Ukrainian news agency UNIAN.

It aims to debunk Russian propaganda and misinformation about Ukraine on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. "Our main goal is to explain what's happening in Ukraine," said Olga Yurkova, one of the founders of StopFake. "We also want to explain why there's such a big conflict between Russia and Ukraine." "We're not going to stop this information war until we find a way to make it more difficult for people who are trying to distort the truth," she added.

Internet trolls

The idea of a cyber-attack on Ukraine has been floated by the country’s government, but it is not clear whether this is what is really happening. The Ukrainian government appears to be using hackers to fight back against Russian cyber-attacks. On Friday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that “a cyber-army” was being built in the country to fight Russian trolls, which have been spreading misinformation about Ukraine and its war with Russia.

Poroshenko said that his administration had set up a special centre for combating disinformation, which would use “special software” to fight “fake news” which he said was being spread about Ukraine by Russians and their allies. He did not elaborate further on what kind of software would be used or how exactly it would be deployed.

Ukraine has accused Russia and its proxies of waging a disinformation campaign against it since 2014 when conflict broke out between pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian forces. This has included fake news stories alleging that Ukrainians are Nazis who want to exterminate ethnic Russians, as well as fake photos supposedly showing atrocities committed by Ukrainian soldiers against civilians in eastern Ukraine (when they were actually taken during the Second World War).

Hacking

Hackers are helping Ukraine win its battle against internet trolls Ukrainian hackers and government officials have developed a new strategy to fight Russian trolls and fake news: They're hacking back. The new tactic was revealed by Anton Gerashchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who advises the country's Interior Ministry on cybercrime.

He told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Ukrainian hackers have begun targeting Russian trolls who are spreading misinformation about Ukraine online. "We must hack them back," Gerashchenko said. "We already know their names and where they live — they will be eliminated.

To conclude

To wrap this up, I think the relationship between Ukraine and Russia is a symptom of something much larger. Our leaders, on all sides of any given conflict becomes so passionate that they forget why they are fighting in the first place. They become consumed with rhetoric instead of facts, with pride over their way of life instead of finding real solutions to the issues at hand.