Russian military's encrypted phones intercepted after destroying 3G/4G towers | Hacker News Reader

Russian military's encrypted phones intercepted after destroying 3G/4G towers

datacenterdynamics.com

39 pointstimthorn9 comments

Your title is incorrect. The destruction of the 3G/4G towers did not allow the encrypted phones to intercepted. It forced the Russians to use insecure commercial communication methods, which can/are intercepted. Please do not change the title necessarily.

Yes, you're right. I'd misunderstood what was happening as a forced 2G downgrade, whereas it was much simpler in reality. However, it was necessary to edit the title as the original article had a verbose headline that wouldn't fit an HN submission

This is obviously fake news. Are people on HN really so gullible that they believe that the Russian military uses CELL PHONES for military communication? They use encrypted radios and satellite communication, like every other modern military. Just because news makes the Russians look bad and the Ukrainians look good doesn't mean it is true.

This article's source is a tweet from a random Twitter user, and his (unshared) audio proof is something that could be fabricated by any Russian speaker (and in its text form could be fabricated by anyone with access to Google Translate). He can't even get the name of the system the Russians are supposedly using right: he claims it is "Era" but one of the article he cites on its development calls it "Aurora". Aurora is just the name of an Android distro that Russia uses, and has nothing to do with secure communication. In fact, the source article is talking about how letting soldiers have access to phones is a source of leaks and that phones are vulnerable to being hacked/backdoored, and that Putin passed a law to curb that, which is why most of the phone camera footage we've seen during the war is from Ukrainian forces/civilians. Here's a Reuters article talking about using Aurora on Huawei tablets to conduct the Russian census [1].

Era seems to be the Era Military Innovation Technopolis [2], which is just an R&D campus, not the name of a secure cellular telecommunications system.

The other article he cites [3] talks about Era testing two projects: Quartz and "Passport" which sound more like a military intranet. This could be construed as a communication system, but this is not the sort of thing used for real-time communication in a war zone.

Considering all the details that this "analyst" got wrong, I don't believe that his interpretation is likely.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-russia-partnership...

[2] https://forceindia.net/cover-story/lofty-goals/

[3 https://twitter.com/methodicjon/status/1500976833646497797

Suggesting it is fake because a native russian cant spell Aurora just makes u look ignorant

Same as this item:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30596057

Reporting this only helps Russia. Why is this being reported at all?

How does confirming that Russia is worse than everything than they claim "helping Russia"?

Because it's reporting a mistake that Russia has made in a place where everyone can see it, including Russia.

But how is reporting "helping Russia"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com