There is currently no data on the use of new methods against Ukraine. The source states that the terrorist country is currently using these tools to “fight the enemy on another front” against its own citizens, who are allegedly “opposing the war”.

How does it work

New technologies have given police and the FSB access to a wide range of surveillance capabilities focused on daily phone and website use. These tools allow Track certain types of activity, track phone locations, identify anonymous social media users and hack people’s accounts, even in encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal. This is evidenced by documents from Russian providers obtained by The New York Times and testimony from a person involved in digital surveillance operations. Also, the publication spoke to the so-called “dissident” Alyona Popova, whom it calls a “digital rights activist”. He said Russia was actively monitoring traffic, and if it previously only concerned activists and political dissidents, it has now been expanded to include “everyone not involved in the war.”

According to the source, the method is to analyze the traffic packets and distinguish their types. For this, the easy-to-use software connects directly to the telecommunications infrastructure. It is clear that for officials inside Russia there is no problem with this. When a user, for example Telegram, sends a regular or “secret” message, the traffic packet has a certain appearance. During a call via WhatsApp, the data already looks different. It’s the same as conditionally sending an image to Signal. At the same time, a certain action in a particular messenger always looks approximately the same.

That is, we are not talking about viewing encrypted messages – special services do not have access to them. The application can encrypt the content of a message or call very well, but it does not affect how its traffic appears to the operator. In this way, all data can be analyzed, it can compare packets with each other and get statistical analysis on a particular user and the types of data they send, determine if someone is using more than one phone, see which phones are in a particular place in certain places. day and more.

All this appears to be possible with the installation of DPI (Deep Packet Analysis) equipment on ISP networks.

• Telegram’s press service confirmed that the messenger does not hide traffic by default, but this can be achieved by connecting a proxy server or VPN.
• Signal also reports that the messenger is not designed to hide the fact of use from the operator.