Ukrainian Hackers Catfish Russian Soldiers, Tricking Them To Share Their Locations: Report

A Ukrainian hacker group claimed it utilized fake online profiles to trick Russian soldiers into sending photos they then used to locate and bomb a military base in Ukraine's occupied Zaporizhzhia region.

The group, nicknamed Hackyourmom, carried out the scheme after it identified a remote Russian base near the occupied city of Melitopol, the Financial Times reported.

Members used fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social media websites to trick Russian soldiers into sending their photos, according to the outlet.

"The Russians, they always want to f**k," Nikita Knysh, Hackyourmom's founder, was quoted as saying.

"They send [a] lot of s**t to 'girls,' to prove that they are warriors," the 30-year-old former employee of the Ukrainian Security Service added.

The photos Knysh's team collected were geolocated and shared with Ukraine's military, and members of the group saw on television a few days later that Ukrainian artillery had blown up the base.

Ukrainian authorities declined to discuss the role of the hackers in the attack.

"My first thought was - I am effective, I can help my country. Then, I realized, I want more of this - I want to find more bases, again and again," Maxim, a Hackyourmom member, said.

Knysh's team has also participated in other hacks.

They allegedly flooded Russia-bound flights with fake bomb threats and tricked Russian television stations into playing news clips about Ukrainian civilian casualties.

The group also hacked thousands of security and traffic cameras in Belarus and parts of Ukraine Russian forces had occupied, according to the report.

In addition, they were supposedly responsible for linking home routers in occupied Ukrainian territory into large bot networks that brought down Russian websites, as well as hacking and leaking the databases of Russian military contractors.

"For me, this felt like combat. With no money, with no brilliant software, and even no brilliant hacks - you can use fraudsters [and] the dark web against your enemy. Right now, Russian laws don't matter - what we have got is the experience of being in the first cyber war," Knysh said.

The Financial Times was not able to verify all of Knysh's claims, but government officials and other hackers vouched for him and reviewed photographs, videos and log files that backed up some of his assertions.

Hackyourmom's members have switched to working remotely. They are currently publishing complex guides online for targets that Knysh declined to discuss.