Hacktivists vs The Dictator: How Belarus cyber army is taking on Alexander Lukashenko and his goons

If it boiled down to a battle of hard power – guns, bullets, and vicious repression – there would surely be no contest.

In the eight weeks since Alexander Lukashenko claimed an unlikely landslide electoral win, his bloody regime has traversed every violent red line imaginable.

It has arrested thousands; tortured hundreds; killed at least five; abducted, threatened and imprisoned political rivals; organised a secret inauguration; and even bared its teeth to a 73-year-old great grandmother.

Protesters, following a more peaceful script, have required ingenuity to keep parity. When the regime launched its terror, they organised mass civil disobedience and strikes. When male protesters began to be arrested en masse, Belarusian women stepped forward to head the protest. When the women began to be arrested, they took to ripping the masks off the arresting officers to remove their anonymity.  

Now, with the confrontation entering a moment of stalemate on the streets, the fight seems to be switching to a new front – cyberspace. And it’s here that the opposition is enjoying some clearcut victories.

Since the start of September, a group of anonymous cyberwarriors describing themselves as the “Cyber Partisans of Belarus” have successfully compromised dozens of government IT systems.

For the most part, the hacks have been embarrassing rather than critical. So, for example, the presidential site, for example, was covered by the red and white national flags preferred by the opposition. President Lukashenko and his interior minister found their profiles included on official Belarusian police wanted lists. Online state news broadcasts were interrupted with footage of police violence.

But the hacktivists have scored serious systemic success too. They paralysed computing systems at the prosecutor general’s office, stock exchange, Minsk police department, and tax office. They blanked government sites for hours at a time. They took the state lottery offline. And they caused the payments system at the Belarusian national bank to crash.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a representative of the Cyber Partisans said cyberattacks against the regime would only escalate. Describing the regime’s IT security as “derisory,” the representative claimed the group already held the capacity to affect the state budget. “We could access bank accounts right now if we wanted, but we understand it would bring more harm than good – so we are holding back,” he said.

The Partisans’ biggest success so far has been the hacking of interior ministry databases, including the names, addresses and phone numbers of serving officers. It has become a powerful weapon in a small country. Officers have to live in the same apartments and shop in the same stores as the general population. Removing their ability to perform abuses anonymously increases the chance of defections significantly. Crucially, it maintains psychological pressure on the system.

In a parallel development, a group of engineers led by US-based expat Andrew Maximov claims to have developed software that can identify officers even while they are wearing masks.

The 30-year old Maximov first demonstrated the potential of his system in a clip analysing infamous footage of police abuse from early August. The YouTube demonstration, which has already been watched by a million viewers, shows the footage of masked officers standing over an unarmed 15-year-old boy with a live grenade. It then purports to show the software matching the man against a database of known officers.

Maximov, whose day job is running a multimillion-dollar AI company in Los Angeles, said the software was straightforward enough. “A 15-year-old with a laptop could do what we do," he claimed. The system uses pre-existing computer vision models to extract facial features, then checks it with other metadata like location and time. Only then does it look for probable matches against the databases.

But Maximov’s sci-fi project has attracted its share of doubters. Even some opposition hacker groups have dismissed the software as “fake”.

The expat engineer stands by his claims. People mistakenly believed Artificial Intelligence was an exact science, he says. “All it reflects are probabilities based on trained data, and I admit the photographic data is still incomplete, but we are working on it.”

On their part, the Cyber Partisans of Belarus also admit that IT sabotage is also some way from securing a revolution. But they say they are playing an “important role” in a “historic movement” and are “sure” of their ability to inflict serious damage on Lukashenko’s 26-year regime.

“We don’t want to reveal our cards just yet,” the Cyber Partisans’ representative said. “Let’s just say we are very confident in what we are doing.”