Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) is "cooperating very fruitfully" with private-sector programmers and hackers in its cyber warfare, a senior SBU official said on Friday.

"We are cooperating very fruitfully with the Ukrainian non-state sector. Deplorably, our resources for cyber warfare can't be compared with the resources that the Russian Federation allocates for war against Ukraine. For this reason in our information confrontation, our cyber confrontation, we rely on the non-state sector, on Ukrainian programmers," Vitaliy Naida, head of the SBU's National Information Security Department, told a briefing in Kyiv.

Asked whether he could confirm information that volunteers and hackers offer their services to the SBU, he said: "I can. I don't want to divulge this information because this may be damaging to our joint ventures."

"Yes, we do cooperate with such people. I wouldn't call them hackers, we call them citizens of Ukraine who are IT specialists. We cooperate with them very closely. Such citizens of Ukraine help us detect vulnerabilities in our state information resources before Russian hackers and special services pay attention to them. People from the non-state sector are among those who help us eliminate such vulnerabilities," Naida said.

He urged Ukrainians to avoid using Russian social networks. "We estimate that Russian propaganda in Russian social networks has a target audience of between 5 and 6 million citizens of Ukraine," he said.