Ukraine hacktivism fights threaten open-source software

Open-source sabotage is a new battlefront

There’s a new battlefront in the raging debate over whether civilian technologists should play any role in punishing Russia for invading Ukraine. 

A volunteer who maintains an immensely popular open-source software tool updated the tool to wipe data from computers in Russia and its ally Belarus, Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard. The updated tool replaced the erased data with a heart emoji.

  • It’s not clear how much damage the update caused, but it has the potential to wreak havoc on computers used by civilian companies and individuals inside Russia and