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Comment by csiegert | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a story I heard: In a conflict, Russia sent SMS to the mothers of Ukrainian(?) soldiers, informing them of their son’s death (pretending to be the Ukrainian government/military). The mothers, distraught, called their son’s cellphone. The increased, clustered cellphone activity near the frontline gave away the unit positions. Shortly after, Russian bombs dropped.

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Went looking for citations:

https://www.ausa.org/articles/russia-gives-lessons-electroni...

https://mwi.usma.edu/text-messages-hell-restraint-informatio...

That's some next level evil genius. Pretty scary.

Russian intelligence was also able to counterfeit an app used by Ukrainian artillery forces to track them: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2016/12/22/russia-u...

Non-amp link: https://fortune.com/2016/12/22/russia-ukraine-app/

If the russians could get the mother's phone numbers, why not the sons? If you're able to identify the location of call activity, why aren't you able to identify the cell while not on a call, when as far as I am aware there is still communication?

Maybe they couldn’t and just sent the SMS to a lot of random numbers. Those that belonged to mothers at the frontline naturally tried to call their sons.

Right. Still curious about monitoring cell activity only during calls. Thinking if you can monitor the cells, just look at the front line cells for comms.

They didn't know where the front line was?

You're involved in a conflict and you don't know where the front line is?

They knew where the front line was, they were trying to learn where the Ukrainian forces were positioned along that front line.

Right, so back to the question - why not just monitor front line cells for activity, which i think can be done without making calls?

I'm guessing: they needed a way to distinguish the troops from the civilians living in the area. By triggering a mass amount of calls to frontline soldiers, they made their positions light up in front of the overall background.

This is sinister genius. Do you have a citation link? I’d love to read more.

Is it typical that soldiers carry mobile phones? It seems like it would open them up to all kinds of possible problems, and I can't think of a reason you would need a cell phone in a conflict when you have a radio, right?

From the volume of photos and videos from US, UK, etc that were based in Afganistan, Iraq etc you can deduce a smartphone is quite normal in those forces, so I would assume the same in Ukrainian forces.

They might not wear them out on patrol or manoeuvres, but back at their tents/barracks, I would assume some if not all have their personal phones. You only need a couple to track them.

I also read once Strave/Fitbit type trackers was rife at army bases and used to work out patrol routes.

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