Ukrainian hackers hoodwinked a group of Russian military wives into posing for a risqué spouse calendar, in the process outing their husbands’ identities by accident and exposing twelve combat pilots in an elite Kremlin air force squadron to possible war crimes charges, reports published by a pair of leading Kyiv-associated civilian activist groups said.
InformNapalm, a leading public group which has supported the Ukrainian military with supplies and funds since 2014, and Cyber Resistance, a loosely-organized team of Ukraine hackers specializing in accessing Russian networks, retrieving and publicizing confidential information, gave details of a successful “virtual” false-flag operation.
InformNapalm produced a detailed report of how the Cyber Resistance activists, posing as Russian patriots, used a combination of social engineering tactics and brute force cyber-attack to hack closed Russian army data networks. In doing so they identified a woman living in Crimea as the wife of Colonel Sergey Valeriyvich Atroshchenko, commander of Russia’s 960th Assault Aviation Regiment.
The 960th is based in occupied Crimea and operates Su-25 ground attack aircraft. According to Ukrainian officials the regiment has conducted hundreds of air strikes on Ukrainian homes and businesses including the devastating Mar. 16 2022 bombing of the Mariupol theater, in which hundreds of civilians were killed.
On Mar. 28 Mariupol mayor-in-exile Petro Andriushchenko publicly accused the 960th by name for both the theatre bombing and that of a Mariupol maternity hospital a week earlier.
Multiple open sources confirm that the 960th regiment operates from Crimea to carry out air strikes in southern Ukraine. While it is undisputed that units of the Russian air force were responsible for the Mariupol bombings, the identity of who carried out the strikes is a military secret.
Russian state media reported, on Mar. 18, that President Vladimir Putin had signed an executive order designating the 960th as a “Guards” regiment because of its excellent combat performance in strikes along the southern front, without specifying target locations.
According to the InformNapalm report, the Cyber Resistance team, used faked Russian identities to pose as activists strongly supporting the Russian military and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Having identified Ms. Antroshchenko, they contacted her and convinced her to organize a photo shoot for herself and eleven other squadron wives to produce a pin-up calendar to boost the morale of military families and army supporters.
It is Russian military tradition, that the wife of a unit commander has substantial sway over “lower-ranking” spouses in the unit, particularly in matters of military families and the provison of morale-boosting support for men in the ranks.
A group shot within the calendar showed the twelve spouses wearing their husbands’ dress tunics bedecked with medals, with an Su-25 strike jet in the background. Ten wore high heels and half of the women paired the air force jacket with ultra-short skirts or thigh-high exercise tights.
It was not possible to independently confirm InformNapalm’s and Cyber Resistance’s account of what amounted to a highly successful false flag operation targeting the Russian military. However, both confidential official and social Russian content published by the Ukrainian activists was fully consistent with similar material viewed by Kyiv Post.
Other sensitive Russian military materials published in the report included the names, ranks, home addresses, passport numbers and personal contact information of the husbands of the wives and other pilots, as well details of individuals found to have collected salaries after leaving air force service, manuals for Russian military air search and air traffic control procedures, and operating instructions for the Russian air force Fazenda-T air search radar.
In its Telegram channel, Cyber Resistance claimed it had also hacked Colonel Antroshchenko’s personal archives within the Russian Ministry of Defense, gaining access to the regimental records including pilots performance evaluations, officer records, bulletins, memos, and operational planning documents, including a 16-page text and slide presentation on improving Russian air force interceptor tactics against NATO AWACS aircraft.
Personal details published included 14-digit coordinates of Atroshchenko’s home, and images of passport photographs seeming to show that Antroshchenko was born in Ukraine’s northern Ovruch region and moved to Russian-occupied Crimea in 2016, two years after the Russian illegal annexation of the peninsula.
The InformNapalm report also published two photographs of Ms. Atroshchenko posing in a bikini with the comment she “liked to send ‘photo surprises’ to her husband”. Cyber Resistance said the published material represents only a fraction of the confidential content now in Ukrainian hands.
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Comments (5)
Serves the orcs right for being so stupid.
Вы готовы? Нагрузка! Стрелять! мертвый военный преступник - это хорошо!
The Ukrainians are smart, courageous, dedicated. I won’t say fearless, because they are probably scared, but they put that aside and fight. There is nothing better than having a good caused the fight for.
Hopefully they will all soon be 'Russian pilot widows'.
but this stupidity isnt punished with 2 years of imprisonment like Aleksej Moskaljov or sent into a re-education camp like Masja Moskaljova
no these mos-cows get an extra medal as if their stupidity never happened
@Maskirovka, What is your point? Are you pro-Russian? There is a corrupt hierarchy in Russia. Really no different here in the US of A. Peaceful protesters on January 6th are rotting in a rotten Washington, D.C. jail since January 6th.
@Jack Griffin, well, well, who will tell tell what is maskirovka and what is there, or whether it is mirrored maskirovka or virtual surreal non reality backwards curling before the BigBang-loop as secondary matter in negative 0 kelvin riding on a multiverse endless in negative pre-time in an inside-out space hyperbole discontinium of externalised black holes just of the backdoor of pre-existing nothingness alined retrograde
to maskirovka or not to maskirovka until the next string of endless kappas past the end of all times
@Maskirovka, I would respectively request you translate that into either English, Ukrainian, or Russian, or whatever is your native language of choice, but somehow I am not hoping a coherent thought will come forward. But thank you kindly for your reply nontheless.
@Jack Griffin, your spread of the big lie about that socalled president elect, agent orange trump paid by rasshist is the never ending noncoherent here
as Susan "Sue" Storm-Richards says, you have no wit and humor
@Jack Griffin, sure pisful ass all are liarss
@Q-Analhighest security level, Not President-elect Trump, who is our legitimate President here in the US. President-elect Trump would have never allowed Putrid to amass his forces on the border, much less invade Ukraine. Joe BRIBEn is a feckless fool under the control of our Military Industrial Complex.
@Jack Griffin, agent orange trump, is paid by rasshist. trump as he did by the Kurds would have betrayed the Ukrains, because trump is deep in the ars of your socalled putrid, vladolf putler
trump is the most corrupt don of new york and elswhere
@Jack Griffin, you are just stupid without humor and wit or brains that you cant read between the lines
@Susan "Sue" Storm-Richards, Susan, your response is not surprising. You make a capable disciple of the Demagogic Cult, formerly known as the Democratic Party. You cannot refute my statement with facts. All you have is a personal attack. You have nothing. Just like your illegitimate, brain-dead, corrupt joke of a President sitting in the White House. Google: The Atlantic Robert Gates on Joe Biden January 2014".
Robert Gates was spot-on. Please be nice, but I fear you have been seduced by the Dark Side, the Demagogic Cult. Hate consumes you.
@Jack Griffin, you are the dark side in every comment you place here when talking about your socalled president-elect
you are the troll from leningrad trollfactory
you are the rasshist payed influencer spreading the big lie