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Andy Greenberg
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Robocalls have become a fashionable scourge, the destroyer of concentration, the annoyance that, in one way or another, cannot be eradicated. But perhaps they can, at least, be reused to deal a tiny and absurd blow opposite to the unprovoked. invasion of Ukraine through the Russian government.
Today, an organization of foreign hacktivists unveiled a website, WasteRussianTime. today, designed to mix phone pranks and robocalls into an automated annoying teletelephony weapon for the Russian state. Visit the site, click a button, and you’ll scroll through a leaked list of Russian government, military, and intelligence telephone numbers to attach two random Russian officials, and allow the site visitor to quietly pay attention while those officials waste time trying to figure out why they’re talking to each other and who made the call.
“We hope there will be confusion, that they will be disappointed and that those calls may even be attractive to other People who speak Russian,” says one of the creators of the site who calls himself Shera. The organization of artists, activists and coders, according to Shera, the site is called Scheherazade’s Obfuscated Dreams. “This war started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Putin’s circle of power, and it is he who we must disturb and annoy. “
Since Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, hacktivists acting independently and even uniting through the Ukrainian government have undertaken an unprecedented crusade of hacking operations targeting Russian organizations, some of which have resulted in the theft and leaking of piles of gigathroughtes. of Russian emails and other personal information. The Ukrainian government itself at one point released a list of what it said were the names and main points of contact of 620 Russian intelligence agents.
Now, by reviewing this stack of leaked information, extracting phone numbers from emails, and combining the effects with those discovered in other public sources, the creators of WasteRussianTime. today say they have amassed more than 5,000 Russian government phone numbers, the two landlines and cell phones, adding up members of the Russian military police, members of its parliament, known as the Duma, and even the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, are now all targets of its automated numbering campaign.
WasteRussianTime. today is designed to start a VoIP call, automatically dial 40 of the leaked phone numbers, and merge the user into a three-way call with the first two phones of Russian officials connecting. The site’s creators say they made a decision not to allow site visitors to communicate calls, so they don’t say anything that could identify them and put them at risk. Therefore, the site is proposed rather as a type of functional art installation, allowing visitors to practice quietly and enjoy their unwanted calls. “Join the anti-war civilian intervention,” the online page reads. “If he’s on the phone, he can’t drop bombs or coordinate soldiers. “
In WIRED’s dozen verification calls to the site just before its launch, it still seemed to solve some problems. It only worked on a desktop computer and many calls resulted in at least one voice message, with silence at the end of the line, or two. voice messages talking to each other. In about part of the calls, at least one Russian-speaking user responded. But on a single call, two other people picked up the phone, and because of a delay, one hung up before the other. he began to speak. Shera said developers are looking for an imaginable latency problem.
The site’s creators say the concept of WasteRussianTime. today emerged about 24 hours after Russia introduced its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February. As the hacktivist organization discussed tactics to protest or disrupt the war, its thinking finally focused on how it can simply create a site that employs leaked Russian phone numbers to allow visitors to call Russian citizens and inform them about the invasion. able to speak Russian, and that calls can simply create security considerations; instead, they turned so that Russian officials would necessarily call jokes, with visitors to the site as an audience.
Vittoria Elliott
Justin Lin
Andy Greenberg
The concept took only about 3 months, in part, according to the site’s creators, because they designed it to cope with the inevitable backlash from the site’s goals. They have a wide variety of numbers ready from which to call, to make your calls. harder to block or ignore. And they’ve hired a service that provides defense against distributed denial-of-service attacks that can be used in a different way to disconnect your site with unwanted traffic bombardments. (They refused to call the service. ) “We believe that the total formula will not live forever; one day it will probably crash,” Shera says, suggesting the site can stay online and functional for hours or weeks.
The creators of WasteRussianTime. today say they have been careful to erase the numbers they have included to make sure they are all government or military personnel, rather than random Russian civilians. For the cell phone numbers they include, for example, they only use the numbers revealed in recent months, as cell phone numbers are occasionally recycled from one user to another. blocked calls. In a message posted online, they asked the Russians to provide a percentage of the government or military telephone numbers they may have, but ask those who provide them to provide a percentage of the verification as much as possible to avoid harassing civilians. our most productive way of not calling a grandmother randomly in Siberia,” Shera says.
The hacktivists claim their concept was fostered in part by news hounds from Bellingcat and Russian news site The Insider, who called Russian officials and even intelligence agents, posing as their colleagues or superiors, to deceive them and reveal sensitive information. This strategy was most commonly used through Alexei Navalny, in collaboration with Bellingcat, when he called an FSB agent and tricked him into confessing to attempting to murder him with the nerve agent Novichok in a nearly hour-long phone call.
But Christo Grozev, the Bulgarian bellingcat researcher and journalist who helped Navalny usurp the FSB’s call, says the task WasteRussianTime. today comes at a cost. it’s not smart for investigations, adding journalistic investigations,” Grozev says.
However, Grozev says he appreciates the joking spirit in which the task was conceived and says it can discourage and demotivate Russian government workers who feel their personal data is not protected. “It’s a wonderful mental operation,” he says. It’s more of a morning radio broadcast farce than a journalistic operation. “
The site’s co-creator, Shera, says many figures are already being released and made public to varying degrees. But, more broadly, if the effect of the task is little more than a farce, so be it. “and disturb the Russian military-industrial complex,” he said. And make other people laugh a little bit. “
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