Cyber war: the 'spicy' methods of the Ukrainians to obtain data from the Russians

@DefAviation ES 9·05·2022 · 20:58 0

It is often said that information is power. The intelligence services are in charge of obtaining and managing them, but their protection is everyone's business.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating the extent to which mismanagement of information can have fatal consequences. This management is even more difficult today, when almost everyone has a mobile phone that can easily take photos and, in addition, there is a great tendency to take self-portraits showing the places they visit on vacation, often unintentionally exposing military positions.

Proof of this was what happened on August 22, when the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense published a photo taken by a Russian tourist next to Russian S-400 missile launchers, which allowed Ukraine to geolocate the position of these weapons systems: "Maybe we are being too hard on russian tourists… Sometimes they can be really helpful. Like this man taking pictures at russian air defense positions near Yevpatoria, in occupied Crimea. Thank you and keep up the good work!", the message from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine noted.

The Ukrainians have also used some "spicy" methods to extract information from the Russian military taking advantage of one of the most common defects of a man, especially when he wants to impress a woman: vanity. The British newspaper Financial Times published yesterday a news in which iot spoke of a Ukrainian cybersecurity expert who has formed a group of 30 people to wage war against Russia online, managing to locate a Russian base near Melitopol, in occupied Ukraine.

Ukrainian hackers used fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social networks (such as VKontakte) and tricked Russian soldiers into sending photos that they geolocated and shared with the Ukrainian Army. One of the hackers pointed out that the Russian soldiers "send lot of shit to 'girls', to prove that they are warriors.". A few days later, the group of hackers saw on television that Ukrainian artillery blew up the Russian base they had discovered. The news indicates that the Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the role of hackers in the operation, but they have realized that with their cyberwar they can also be useful to their country.

Another of the actions carried out by the group of hackers was hacking thousands of security and traffic cameras in Belarus and in the areas of Ukraine occupied by the Russians. These cameras allow the movements of all types of vehicles, including military ones, to be followed. "To filter the information, the team wrote machine-learning code that helped them separate military movements from ordinary traffic, and they funnelled the information to the military via a public portal", the FT points out.

In World War II, the allied forces carried out campaigns to ask their soldiers not to reveal military information to anyone, even to girls they met apparently by accident. That information could cost lives. The Russians seem to have overlooked the need to advise their soldiers to be wary of what they tell.

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Photo: Dreamstime.