A hacking group announced the creation of an online tool that allows users to send automatic text messages to random phone numbers in Russia in order to spread information about the military invasion in Ukraine at a time when Russian citizens can only turn to official means for the search for information.
The application was created by the hacking group known as Squad303 and is hosted on the domain 1920.in. The tool uploads a pre-written statement to the native SMS app of a user trying to inform Russians about the current war as an anti-censorship measure: “Dear Russians, your media is being censored. The Kremlin is lying… Discover the truth about Ukraine on the Internet for free and on the Telegram app. It’s time to topple dictator Putin! “.
The developers claim that their tool has been downloaded millions of times, allowing the sending of more than 6 million messages. At the moment there is no way to verify this claim. Squad303 also claims that its service has been the target of denial of service (DoS) attacks, which has led to short-term outages.
An alleged member of Squad303 described the development of this app as a nonviolent communication project aimed at circumventing Russia’s crackdown on independent news sources. The tool’s domain name refers to Poland’s surprise victory against the Russian navy in 1920: “We know that people wanted to help the Ukrainians. We wanted to give them a tool to dialogue with Russian citizens,” says the member of the hacking group, who also said he was surprised that Russia resorted to censorship so soon.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.