[ConcernedCitizen]

No longer controlled by Ukrainian assets

It all started with the Ukrainian President's willingness to go out in the field with soldiers.

"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is addressing Ukrainians on his Telegram account. Ukrainian hackers are organizing against Russian forces. And ordinary Ukrainians are sharing on-the-ground photos and videos on social media detailing the impact of Russia’s destruction."

This is a huge OpSec breach of both physical security and of signals intelligence. We know that troops are on the ground with their personal devices, just from the videos of Ukrainian forces with cell phones out in their barracks. So why is this bad? Because the cell signals can be used to aim missiles and the Russians don't even have to really aim at a direct target, only a nearby signal. Triangulation is therefore not necessary but entirely feasible given enough cellular signals to map a target area.

Russian intelligence services can eavesdrop on phone calls and emails and also gather very accurate geolocation and other metadata. The Russian army is using Ukrainian commercial networks to communicate. Russian forces don’t want to destroy infrastructure that they will need if they succeed in conquering Ukraine. Not only is it simple to use IMSI catchers on networks you infiltrated, it's also entirely plausible that those same networks, with which Ukrainians are communicating to their loved ones, are the same networks they use to communicate troop movements and formations. These are not unencrypted channels, usually, but they are not that encrypted so as to prevent being targeted. The nature of cell phones was always to track and gather information.

What else can signals from cell phones provide? Local network names and, in some cases, access points are only using WPS (a massive failure in security). Please don't use WPS. Only use the latest WPA. Version 2 is good but 3 is well on its way, please utilize it for your router. Using WPA3 protocol makes your Wi-Fi network highly resistant to security risks like offline dictionary attacks. And both nations use IMSI catchers, though not called that, they are the same exact thing the United States uses to catch dissidents at gatherings for political activism and hacktivists attending conferences like HackerCon and DefCon.

To troops fighting on both sides, especially in border towns with high signal traffic:
Let me ask you this - is your communication to a loved one more important than the lives of the soldiers fighting for the country? I must urge all troops to cease all usage of the networks in their own country, and that's not an easy thing to ask because communication with families during this time is so vital to the mental health of the troops, but this is unnecessarily risking the lives of not only you but all the people fighting alongside you.

There is now a reasonable actionable threat that the Ukrainian cell towers have been taken over completely.

My proof is as follows:

March 15, 2022 - RU spies 'infiltrated Ukraine's international volunteers' - Spies traveled to the country specifically to investigate troops movements and attack hard targets.



March 19, 2022 - 4 days later, British volunteers are feared to have 'triggered a deadly airstrike on a Ukrainian military base after their phones were detected in the area'



The r/ukrainevolunteers subreddit contains useful information, sometimes exact troop count and placement in video or photo format - and it has led to more than a few disappearances of would-be volunteers.



An image that shows how easy it is to catch signals using a scan with airodump, a tool readily available to all users of Kali Linux. Here you can see the local device MAC address or BSSID (indicating physical address and type of the device), as well as the channel (CH) and frequency it operates on, and the name of the network (ESSID) to name key data points. It also shows the target encryption (ENC) strength and which cipher is used.



Some users of the subreddit are even going as far as to post detailed descriptions of themselves and of their fellow troops and volunteers. Here's a shot of u/Bitter-Company6343, who has not been seen since this thread was created and they left for the country from Frankfurt to Krakow on flight LH 1370 on February 26.



And here's their chilling final words and users questioning whether they're still alive.



Here's another user u/PanicDeepRageDeeper, showing exact contents of their go-bag and it looks as if they really are planning to join the fight.





You can see a vest with plates, military spec boots and rations as well as medical supplies, and other materials that would be useful. They later post a plan of their specific movements that would be useful to Russian threats locating them using simple metadata embedded in the photos they put onto Reddit. They haven't been heard from in almost a month.

Another failure in OpSec: a troop posting an image/selfie they took in a school or other building that also contains location metadata and shows the size of the battalion and weapons they carry, seemingly Russian AK's and small arms. Useful for spies to determine locations and target strengths.

[Dismas]

Opsec fail. Can't speak for other countries, but I know U.S. and several NATO countries explicitly forbid soldiers from taking and sharing photos like this.

[ConcernedCitizen]

Opsec fail. Can't speak for other countries, but I know U.S. and several NATO countries explicitly forbid soldiers from taking and sharing photos like this.

Like the first 3 sections in the first chapters of the official US Army/Navy Opsec guide for general contractors contains everything in this thread.


The full PDF is available here: Contractor's Guide to OPSEC

[imgr8ness]

Someone should tell user u/PanicDeepRageDeeper that bandaids are useless for bullet wounds

[imgr8ness]

'I have credible intelligence to suggest cell towers in Ukraine are..No longer controlled by Ukrainian assets'

Not exactly. They don't need to control the cell towers, they just need to impersonate cell towers. Even more effective is knocking out legitimate towers (physical destruction of some kind) then that ensures all cell comms in that area will connect to your 'fake' tower without having to compete for the network. Of course, being in a warzone, its much easier to achieve that.