Plus: Scammers try to dupe Apple with 5,000 fake iPhones, Avast gets fined for selling browsing data, and researchers figure out how to clone fingerprints from your phone screen.

Today marks two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This week, we detailed the growing crisis in Eastern Ukraine, which is now littered with deadly mines. As it fights back the invading Russian forces, Ukraine’s government is working to develop new mine-clearing technology that could help save lives around the globe.

A leaked document obtained by WIRED has revealed the secret placement of gunshot-detection sensors in locations around the United States and its territories. According to the document, which ShotSpotter's parent company authenticated, the sensors, which are used by police departments in dozens of metropolitan areas in the United States, are largely located in low-income and minority communities, according to WIRED’s analysis, adding crucial context in a long-running debate over police use of the technology.

Speaking of leaks, WIRED this week obtained 15 years of messages posted to an internal system used by members of the US Congress. The House Intelligence Committee used the “Dear Colleagues” system to warn lawmakers of an “urgent matter”—something that has not happened since at least 2009. That urgent matter, which was quickly leaked to the press, turned out to be related to Russian military research of space-based weapons. But some sources say the matter wasn’t urgent at all, and the warning was instead an attempt by House Intelligence leadership to derail a vote on privacy reforms to a major US surveillance program.

On Tuesday, a coalition of law enforcement agencies led by the UK’s National Crime Agency disrupted the LockBit ransomware gang’s operation, seizing its infrastructure, dark-web leak site, and code used to carry out its attacks against thousands of institutions globally. Although ransomware attacks resulted in a record $1.1 billion in ransom payments last year, Anne Neuberger, a top US cyber official in the Biden administration, tells WIRED how the 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline has transformed the ways American institutions defend against and respond to such attacks.

In dual wins for privacy this week, the Signal Foundation began its rollout of usernames for its popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app. The update will allow people to connect without having to reveal their phone numbers. Meanwhile, Apple began to future-proof its encryption for iMessage with the launch of PQ3, a next-generation encryption protocol designed to resist decryption from quantum computers.

And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Hundreds of documents linked to a Chinese hacking-for-hire firm were dumped online this week. The files belong to i-Soon, a Shanghai-based company, and give a rare glimpse into the secretive world of the industry that supports China’s state-backed hacking. The leak includes details of Chinese hacking operations, lists of victims and potential targets, and the day-to-day complaints of i-Soon staff.

“These leaked documents support TeamT5’s long-standing analysis: China's private cybersecurity sector is pivotal in supporting China’s APT attacks globally,” Che Chang, a cyber threat analyst at the Taiwan-based cybersecurity firm TeamT5, tells WIRED. Chang says the company has been tracking i-Soon since 2020 and found that it has a close relationship with Chengdu 404, a company linked to China’s state-backed hackers.

While the documents have now been removed from GitHub, where they were first posted, the identity and motivations of the person, or people, who leaked them remains a mystery. However, Chang says the documents appear to be real, a fact confirmed by two employees working for i-Soon, according to the Associated Press, which reported that the company and police in China are investigating the leak.

“There are around eight categories of the leaked files. We can see how i-Soon engaged with China's national security authorities, the details of i-Soon’s products and financial problems,” Chang says. “More importantly, we spotted documents detailing how i-Soon supported the development of the notorious remote access Trojan (RAT), ShadowPad,” Chang adds. The ShadowPad malware has been used by Chinese hacking groups since at least 2017.

Since the files were first published, security researchers have been poring over their contents and analyzing the documentation. Included were references to software to run disinformation campaigns on X, details of efforts to access communications data across Asia, and targets within governments in the United Kingdom, India, and elsewhere, according to reports by the _New York Times_ and the _The Washington Post_. The documents also reveal how i-Soon worked for China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army.

According to researchers at SentinelOne, the files also include pictures of “custom hardware snooping devices,” such as a power bank that could help steal data and the company’s marketing materials. “In a bid to get work in Xinjiang–where China subjects millions of Ugyhurs to what the UN Human Rights Council has called genocide–the company bragged about past counterterrorism work,” the researchers write. “The company listed other terrorism-related targets the company had hacked previously as evidence of their ability to perform these tasks, including targeting counterterrorism centers in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

The Federal Trade Commission has fined antivirus firm Avast $16.5 for collecting and selling people’s web browsing data through its browser extensions and security software. This included the details of web searches and the sites people visited, which, according to the FTC, revealed people’s “religious beliefs, health concerns, political leanings, location, financial status, visits to child-directed content and other sensitive information.” The company sold the data through its subsidiary Jumpshot, the FTC said in an order announcing the fine.

The ban also places five obligations on Avast: not to sell or license browsing data for advertising purposes; to obtain consent if it is selling data from non-Avast products; delete information it transferred to Jumpshot and any algorithms created from the data; tell customers about the data it sold; and introduce a new privacy program to address the problems the FTC found. An Avast spokesperson said that while they “disagree with the FTC’s allegations and characterization of the facts,” they are “pleased to resolve this matter.”

Two Chinese nationals living in Maryland—Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue—have been convicted of mail fraud and a conspiracy to commit mail fraud for a scheme that involved sending 5,000 counterfeit iPhones to Apple. The pair, who could each face up to 20 years in prison, according to the The Register, hoped Apple would send them real phones in return. The fake phones had “spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers” to trick Apple stores or authorized service providers into thinking they were genuine. The scam took place between May 2017 and September 2019 and would have cost Apple more than $3 million in losses, a US Department of Justice press release says.

Security researchers from the US and China have created a new side-channel attack that can reconstruct people’s fingerprints from the sounds they create as you swipe them across your phone screen. The researchers used built-in microphones in devices to capture the “faint friction sounds” made by a finger and then used these sounds to create fingerprints. “The attack scenario of PrintListener is extensive and covert,” the researchers write in a paper detailing their work. “It can attack up to 27.9 percent of partial fingerprints and 9.3 percent of complete fingerprints within five attempts.” The research raises concerns about real-world hackers who are attempting to steal people’s biometrics to access bank accounts.

A Mysterious Leak Exposed Chinese Hacking Secrets

The locations of microphones used to detect gunshots have been kept hidden from police and the public. A WIRED analysis of leaked coordinates confirms arguments critics have made against the technology.

Finding shell casings can be extremely difficult. A Los Angeles Police Department officer not authorized to speak to the media tells WIRED they’ve spent “hours” searching for bullet casings. Just because officers don’t find evidence of gunfire, they say, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

While SoundThinking says its alerts are reviewed by its Incident Review Center before being sent to the police, in Pasadena, officers who investigated ShotSpotter alerts reported that the suspected gunfire was sometimes something else entirely: a car backfiring, construction noise, or fireworks, Knock LA reported.

Chris Baumohl, an EPIC Law Fellow and coauthor of the petition to the DOJ, tells WIRED that our findings confirm what the nonprofit wrote in their petition in September: that ShotSpotter surveillance disproportionately occurs in communities of color. He also alleges that the technology primes police to go into minority communities believing that shots are fired, whether accurate or not. The result, Baumohl argues, is that community members are more likely to be picked up on bench warrants, misdemeanors, and for other reasons unrelated to guns.

In February, a leaked internal report from the State's Attorney’s Office in Illinois’ Cook County, where Chicago is located, found that nearly a third of arrests stemming from a ShotSpotter alert had nothing to do with a gun, Baumohl points out. On February 13, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a vocal critic of ShotSpotter, said the city won't renew its contract with SoundThinking.

According to SoundThinking’s Chittum, the idea that police show up to ShotSpotter alerts ready to make arrests is speculation based on a few high-profile incidents. Instead, he argues that ShotSpotter provides law enforcement with accurate data to engage the community safely. “It allows police to knock on a door and tell residents, ‘Hey, we got a report of gunfire, we are just checking to see if everyone is OK. Did you hear anything? Did you see anything? If you do, please call us; we care, and we’ll come.’”

Ultimately, Chittum argues, ShotSpotter is simply a tool. When used correctly it can help police-community relations. “It’s up to the police to decide how they use it,” he says.

But what happens on the ground often paints a more complicated picture than what Chittum describes. WIRED reviewed body camera footage and police records of a 2022 ShotSpotter arrest in Cincinnati. According to the records, at 8:21 pm on New Year's Eve, police officers were dispatched to an area where two loud sounds were picked up by SoundThinking sensors. When the officers arrived, they quickly detained a tall man in a blue hoodie and black jacket who was standing near the corner where the technology had indicated gunfire.

According to police records, there were nine officers on the scene that night. Body camera footage shows one of the officers rifling through the man’s pockets as others milled around. Some pointed their flashlights at the ground or in the windows of parked cars. Others chatted, speculating about the potential whereabouts of bullet casings.

“I’m glad we could come out and help,” a sergeant watching the man being searched tells the officer standing next to him.

Police never found a bullet casing, gun, or bullet hole. They arrested the man anyway. After running his name through their on-car computer, they discovered he had warrants out for his arrest. He had failed to appear in court for traffic violations.

_Additional data analysis by Matt Casey, data science content lead at Snorkel AI, a firm that helps companies with AI projects and builds custom AI with its data development platform._

_Updated 2/23/2024, 12:15 pm EST to clarify that the list of sensors included in the document WIRED obtained may not include every ShotSpotter microphone._

Here Are the Secret Locations of ShotSpotter Gunfire Sensors

The US Congress was preparing to vote on a key foreign surveillance program last week. Then a wild Russian threat appeared.

A decision by US House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) chair Mike Turner to sound the alarm over space-based Russian military research was far more extraordinary than previously reported.

A WIRED review of an internal messaging system used by the United States Congress shows that HPSCI rarely sends members invites to review classified documents and has not—in at least 15 years—alarmed lawmakers by announcing an “urgent” threat against the United States.

The Dear Colleague system is widely used by congressional committees and lawmakers individually to circulate internal memos, invites, and other announcements. This week, WIRED obtained all messages sent House-wide by HPSCI since 2009. Copies of Dear Colleague messages sent since then are backed up by the system. The source of the messages was granted anonymity because their disclosure was not authorized.

The messages reveal that only on a handful of occasions has HPSCI sent letters informing members of classified documents available for review. Of those, none had previously demanded “urgent” attention.

The urgency with which Turner and other HPSCI members characterized the disclosure—only later revealed to concern Russian military research—has been downplayed by fellow lawmakers and Biden administration officials. As a result, criticism has fallen on Turner over the announcement, which generated a slew of provocative headlines and gave life to vague concerns by US officials over the protection of classified sources and methods.

A _Washington Post_ headline that remains visible to users on Google wildly declares: “U.S. officials say Russia has deployed a nuclear weapon in space.” Covering the story for CNN, national security reporter Jim Sciutto was far more tempered, telling TV viewers: “This is something that Russia is experimenting with, looking into designing. This is not a clear and present danger.”

Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, lambasted Turner during the same CNN segment, labeling him an “intelligence leaker.” Moulton added that two years had passed since he’d first been briefed on the Russian research. “I haven’t had a problem keeping it a secret,” he said.

WIRED reported on Friday that sources on Capitol Hill had begun accusing Turner and his Democratic counterpart on HPSCI, Jim Himes, of issuing the disclosure to influence a vote happening simultaneously to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Turner and Himes, after both signing the “Dear Colleague” message the night before, failed to appear at a Rules Committee hearing on Wednesday just as news of the Russian threat went viral.

House speaker Mike Johnson abruptly canceled the vote shortly after, under what sources describe as intense pressure from Turner.

HSCPI spokesperson Jeff Naft—who did not respond to an inquiry prior to WIRED’s story on Friday—later refuted the allegation, calling the implication of ties between the surveillance vote and the Russian intel “way off base.”

The spokesperson said it was a screenshot of HPSCI’s Dear Colleague letter—posted by reporters online less than a day after it was sent—that forced Turner to issue a press release about the supposed Russian threat.

Turner’s press release notably went further than HPSCI’s letter, pressing US president Joe Biden to personally “declassify all information” concerning the threat. The next day, Turner issued a second statement declaring he’d worked closely “with the Biden administration” before notifying Congress. Naft, the HPSCI spokesperson, clarified by email that Turner had worked with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on the language describing the threat contained in the Dear Colleague letter. (Naft stressed Turner had “NEVER” stated he’d cooperated with the White House.)

Turner’s second statement added that HPSCI had voted 23–1 to make the disclosure. According to the committee’s own rules, a vote is not required to bring classified material to the attention of the chairmen and ranking members of other committees; only House-wide alerts require a vote. It is unclear which HPSCI member voted against the disclosure, as no official roll call was taken.

A senior congressional source tells WIRED the Dear Colleague letter was always destined to cause panic. It is widely understood that the letters are not a secure form of communication and are often disclosed to reporters and others working off the Hill.

Only four times in the past decade and a half, according to WIRED’s review of the system, has HPSCI used a Dear Colleague letter to draw attention to classified material—outside of routine budgetary concerns.

The first such message is dated March 2009 and pertains to two classified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports. The subject of the reports is undeclared. A second letter was issued by HPSCI and signed by former congressperson Devin Nunes on January 10, 2017, informing members of a classified report on “Russian activities and intentions in the recent US election.”

Neither letter is marked urgent.

A third letter informing members about the option to review classified material is dated February 24, 2010; however, it makes clear the material was made available at the request of the intelligence community (IC). It is one of numerous letters in which HPSCI is seen lobbying on the spy agencies’ behalf—in this case, to support a renewal of the 9/11-era USA PATRIOT Act, today defunct due to a lack of support in Congress.

A plurality of HPSCI’s Dear Colleague letters are aimed at whipping support for bills that reauthorize or advance US spy powers. Others urge lawmakers to vote against legislation that would enhance Americans’ privacy protections. One such letter reads simply: “Don’t Handcuff the FBI and Intelligence Community.”

Six other letters are invitations to classified briefings held by intelligence agencies. HPSCI routinely acts as a mediator between the agencies and members of Congress, arranging briefings and other events on the intelligence community’s behalf.

HPSCI sent an additional three Dear Colleagues letters the morning after its “urgent” warning about Russia went out: Each asked members to support various amendments to a FISA bill during an upcoming vote that HPSCI’s chair was, simultaneously, working to get called off.

Sources told WIRED that Johnson’s decision to delay the vote on FISA came amid a sudden threat by Turner to kill the bill the moment it got to the floor. Turner was motivated to stop the bill’s progress at any cost, they said, due to the growing odds of a rival committee passing amendments of their own—to dramatically curtail the FBI’s domestic surveillance abilities.

_Updated 2/22/2024, 3:55 pm EST: Clarified the procedural requirements for bringing classified information to the attention of members of the House of Representatives._

Leak Reveals the Unusual Path of ‘Urgent’ Russian Threat Warning

Useful quantum computers aren’t a reality—yet. But in one of the biggest deployments of post-quantum encryption so far, Apple is bringing the technology to iMessage.

Apple is launching its first post-quantum protections, one of the biggest deployments of the future-resistant encryption technology to date.

Billions of medical records, financial transactions, and messages we send to each other are protected by encryption. It’s fundamental to keeping modern life and the global economy running relatively smoothly. However, the decades-long race to create vastly powerful quantum computers, which could easily crack current encryption, creates new risks.

While practical quantum computing technology may still be years or decades away, security officials, tech companies, and governments are ramping up their efforts to start using a new generation of post-quantum cryptography. These new encryption algorithms will, in short, protect our current systems against any potential quantum computing-based attacks.

Today Cupertino is announcing that PQ3—its post-quantum cryptographic protocol—will be included in iMessage. The update will launch in iOS and iPad OS 17.4 and macOS 14.4 after previously being deployed in the beta versions of the software. Apple, which published the news on its security research blog, says the change is the “most significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history.”

“We rebuilt the iMessage cryptographic protocol from the ground up,” its blog post says, adding that the upgrade will fully replace its existing encryption protocols by the end of this year. You don’t need to do anything other than update your operating system for the new protections to be applied.

Quantum computing is serious business. Governments in the US, China, and Russia as well as tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and IBM are plowing billions into the (still) relatively nascent efforts to create quantum computers. If successful, the technologies could help unlock scientific breakthroughs in everything from drug design to creating longer-lasting batteries. Politicians are also vying to become quantum superpowers. The current quantum computing devices are still experimental and not practical for general use.

Unlike the computers we use today, quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in more than one state. (Current bits are either ones or zeroes). It means that quantum devices can store more information than traditional computers and perform more complex calculations, including potentially cracking encryption.

“Quantum computers, if deployed reliably and in a scalable manner, would have the potential to break most of today’s cryptography,” says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity and privacy researcher and consultant. This includes the encryption in the messaging apps that billions of people use every day. Most encrypted messaging apps using public key cryptography have used RSA, Elliptic Curve, or Diffie-Hellman algorithms.

Responding to the potential threat—which has been known about since the 1990s—intelligence and security agencies have become increasingly vocal about developing and deploying quantum-resistant cryptography. The National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US has been a driving force behind the creation of these new encryption types. Olejnik says tech companies are taking the quantum threat “very” seriously. “Much more serious than some older changes like switches between hash functions,” Olejnik says, adding that things are moving relatively fast given that post-quantum cryptography is still “very young” and there’s “no functional quantum computer on the horizon.”

Apple’s rollout of PQ3 in iMessage follows Signal in introducing post-quantum algorithms—the encrypted messaging app introduced its PQXDH specification in September, saying it is built on the Kyber algorithm. Proton, the creator of encrypted email and other apps, said around the same time that it is building quantum-safe PGP encryption for everyone to use.

In its blog post, Apple details how PQ3 has been built and how it operates. The company says PQ3 creates a new post-quantum encryption key as part of the public keys that phones and computers using iMessage create and transmit to Apple’s servers. The company is using the Kyber algorithm—the same approach as Signal—to do this and will generate the keys from the first message that is sent, even if the person receiving the message is offline.

Apple says its setup will apply its post-quantum protections to the creation of encryption keys and the exchange of messages, including if someone’s encryption key has been compromised by an attacker. “To best protect end-to-end encrypted messaging, the post-quantum keys need to change on an ongoing basis to place an upper bound on how much of a conversation can be exposed by any single, point-in-time key compromise—both now and with future quantum computers,” the company says in its blog post.

The post-quantum protections are an addition to its existing encryption, Apple says. It is using a “hybrid design” that combines its current elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with the newer post-quantum protections. “Defeating PQ3 security requires defeating both the existing, classical ECC cryptography and the new post-quantum primitives,” Apple writes.

Apple says PQ3 has been externally assessed by a third-party security company, which it has not named, and also two groups of academics who have written papers analyzing the system. The company argues that its approach—as it is able to issue new quantum keys—has stronger protections than Signal’s current deployment. “We conclude that this protocol achieves strong security guarantees against an active network adversary who can selectively compromise parties and has quantum computing capabilities,” a research paper led by David Basin, a computer science professor at ETH Zurich, says of PQ3.

While there’s no guarantee that quantum technologies will ever develop enough to become useful, it’s likely that the next few years will see a steady drip of companies deploying and enhancing their post-quantum protocols. In part, this is to combat one of the biggest current fears around quantum computing: that countries and threat actors are gathering and hoarding encrypted data today with the plan to unlock its secrets if quantum technologies evolve.

Starting to deploy post-quantum encryption now—before functional quantum computers exist—has the potential to limit the impact of these so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. “We are seeing our adversaries do this—copying down our encrypted data and just holding on to it,” Dustin Moody, who leads post-quantum encryption standards in the US told _The New Yorker_ in 2022. “It’s definitely a real threat.”

Apple iOS 17.4: iMessage Gets Post-Quantum Encryption in New Update

Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, tells WIRED about emerging cybersecurity threats—and what the US plans to do about them.

Anne Neuberger, a Top White House Cyber Official, Sees the 'Promise and Peril' in AI

We tested the end-to-end encrypted messenger’s new feature aimed at addressing critics’ most persistent complaint. Here’s how it works.

For nearly a decade, cybersecurity professionals and privacy advocates have recommended the end-to-end encrypted communications app Signal as the gold standard for truly private digital communications. Using it, however, has paradoxically required exposing one particular piece of private information to everyone you text or call: a phone number. Now, that's finally changing.

Today, Signal launched the rollout in beta of a long-awaited set of features it's describing simply as “phone number privacy.” Those features, which WIRED has tested, are designed to allow users to conceal their phone numbers as they communicate on the app and instead share a username as a less-sensitive method of connecting with one another. Rather than give your phone number to other Signal contacts as the identifier they use to begin a conversation with you, in other words, you can now choose to be discoverable via a chosen handle—or even to prevent anyone who does have your phone number from finding you on Signal.

You’ll now be able to set a unique username as a way for people to find you on Signal in addition to—or instead of—your phone number.

Courtesy of Signal

The use of phone numbers has long been perhaps the most persistent criticism of Signal's design. These new privacy protections finally offer a fix, says Meredith Whittaker, Signal's president. “We want to build a communications app that everyone in the world can easily use to connect with anyone else _privately_. That ‘privately’ is really in bold, underlined, in italics,” Whittaker tells WIRED. “So we're extremely sympathetic to people who might be using Signal in high-risk environments who say, 'The phone number is really sensitive information, and I don't feel comfortable having that disseminated broadly.'”

In the new features—which are available in beta now, but which Signal plans to roll out in a more final version in the coming weeks—Signal has made three changes, one setting that's now switched on by default and two that are opt-in features. First, by default, your phone number will no longer be visible in your Signal profile unless someone already has the number saved in their phone's address book. Second, you can now choose to create and share a unique username, or a QR code that contains it, with anyone you want to connect with. Mine, for instance, is Andy.01. (Once someone does start messaging you, a little confusingly, they'll see your chosen profile name instead of that username. That profile name, just as before in Signal, doesn't have to be unique, and the person you're interacting with can also change it in their own view of you in the app.)

New settings in Signal allow you to change both the visibility and discoverability of your phone number. Your number’s visibility will be turned off by default. Turning off its discoverability, a more drastic measure, will be left as an opt-in setting for higher risk users.

Courtesy of Signal

The third new feature, which is not enabled by default and which Signal recommends mainly for high-risk users, allows you to turn off not just your number's visibility but its discoverability. That means no one can find you in Signal unless they have your username, even if they already know your number or have it saved in their address book. That extra safeguard might be important if you don't want anyone to be able to tie your Signal profile to your phone number, but it will also make it significantly harder for people who know you to find you on Signal.

The new phone number protections should now make it possible to use Signal to communicate with untrusted people in ways that would have previously presented serious privacy risks. A reporter can now post a Signal username on a social media profile to allow sources to send encrypted tips, for instance, without also sharing a number that allows strangers to call their cell phone in the middle of the night. An activist can discreetly join an organizing group without broadcasting their personal number to people in the group they don't know.

In the past, using Signal without exposing a private number in either of those situations would have required setting up a new Signal number on a burner phone—a difficult privacy challenge for people in many countries that require identification to buy a SIM card—or with a service like Google Voice. Now you can simply set a username instead, which can be changed or deleted at any time. (Any conversations you've started with the old username will switch over to the new one.) To avoid storing even those usernames, Signal is also using a cryptographic function called a Ristretto hash, which allows it to instead store a list of unique strings of characters that encode those handles.

Amid these new features designed to calibrate exactly who can learn your phone number, however, one key role for that number hasn't changed: There's still no way to avoid sharing your phone number with Signal itself when you register. The fact that this requirement persists even after Signal's upgrade will no doubt rankle some critics who have pushed Signal's developers to better cater to users seeking more complete anonymity, such that even Signal's own staff can't see a phone number that might identify users or hand that number over to a surveillance agency wielding a court order.

Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite as the identifier Signal privately collects from its users. That's partly because it prevents spammers from creating endless accounts since phone numbers are scarce. Phone numbers are also what allow anyone to install Signal and have it immediately populate with contacts from their address book, a key element of its usability.

In fact, designing a system that prevents spam accounts and imports the user's address book _without_ requiring a phone number is “a deceptively hard problem,” says Whittaker. “Spam prevention and actually being able to connect with your social graph on a communications app—those are existential concerns,” she says. “That's the reason that you still need a phone number to register, because we still need a thing that does that work.”

The continued phone number requirement means Signal's privacy upgrade is a compromise, says Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography and computer science at Johns Hopkins University who has in the past consulted for both Google and Facebook in their implementation of Signal's open source encryption protocol. “It's a half solution,” says Green. “It's not a perfect solution.”

Green notes, however, that even if it doesn't satisfy the most die-hard privacy advocates, it represents a significant improvement for a much larger portion of Signal's hundreds of millions of users. “There’s a legitimate community of people who wanted to use Signal without giving other people their phone numbers, and they’re going to be very happy with this change. And then there's a more hardcore set of people who don’t want to ever give their number to Signal,” Green says. “I think getting a big set of people serviced is the right direction, and working on satisfying all the other people is something for Signal to keep working on.”

Signal doesn't currently have any road map toward dropping its use of phone numbers as a registration mechanism, Whittaker concedes—she says for now, there's no alternative that wouldn't sacrifice Signal's usability, which she argues would represent a net loss for privacy advocates. But she says that the new phone number privacy features are nonetheless Signal's careful attempt to solve the problem phone numbers represent without losing the qualities that have made Signal popular in the first place.

“It's really about staying true to our principles,” Whittaker says. “In more and more ways—in better and better ways—to fill that promise of easy, usable, private communications.”

_Correction: 2/20/24, 1:25 pm EST: Meredith Whittaker's professional title is president of the Signal Foundation._

Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private

LockBit’s website, infrastructure, and data have been seized by law enforcement—striking a huge blow against one of the world’s most prolific ransomware groups.

For the past four years, the LockBit ransomware group has been on an unrelenting rampage, hacking into thousands of businesses, schools, medical facilities, and governments around the world—and making millions in the process. A children’s hospital, Boeing, the UK’s Royal Mail, and sandwich chain Subway have all been recent victims.

But LockBit’s hacking campaign has come to a juddering halt. A sweeping law enforcement operation, led by police at the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and involving investigators from 10 forces around the world, has infiltrated the ransomware group and taken its systems offline.

Graeme Biggar, the director general of the NCA, says the group has been “fundamentally disrupted.” The law enforcement operation, called Operation Cronos, has taken control of LockBit's infrastructure and administration system, seized its dark-web leak site, accessed its source code, seized around 11,000 domains and servers, and obtained details of the group's members. “As of today, LockBit is effectively redundant,” Biggar said at a press conference in London, appearing with law enforcement officials from the FBI and Europol. “We have hacked the hackers,” he says.

The action is one of the largest and potentially most significant ever taken against a cybercrime group. Biggar says the law enforcement officials consider LockBit, which is global in nature, to have been the “most prolific and harmful” ransomware group that has been active in recent years. It was responsible for 25 percent of attacks in the past year. “LockBit ransomware has caused losses of billions,” Biggar says of the overall costs of attacks and recovery.

In addition to the seizing of technical infrastructure, the law enforcement operations around LockBit also include arrests in Poland, Ukraine, and the United States, as well as sanctions for two alleged members of the group who are based in Russia. The group has members spread around the world, the officials said.

Nicole Argentieri, acting assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, says LockBit has received more than $120 million in ransomware payments, and that the action announced against the group is just the start of the clampdowns.

The law enforcement action against LockBit was first revealed when its ransomware website dropped offline on February 19 and was replaced by a holding page saying it had been seized by police. The LockBit group, which debuted as “ABCD” before changing its name, first appeared at the end of 2019. Since then, LockBit has rapidly attacked businesses and grown its name recognition within the cybercrime ecosystem. “LockBit has been a thorn in the side of businesses and governments for years, with well over 3,000 publicly known victims, and \[has been\] seemingly untouchable,” says Allan Liska, an analyst specializing in ransomware for cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Lockbit’s long roster of victims include various US government organizations, ports, and automotive companies.

LockBit operates as a ransomware-as-a-service operation, with a core handful of members creating its malware and running its website and infrastructure. This core group licenses its code to “affiliates,” who launch attacks against companies, steal their data, and try to extort money from them. “LockBit is the last of the ‘open affiliate’ ransomware-as-a-service offerings, meaning anyone willing to cough up the cash can join their program with little or no vetting,” Liska says. “They likely have had hundreds of affiliates over the course of their run.”

The Notorious Lockbit Ransomware Gang Has Been Disrupted by Law Enforcement

The widespread use of mines has left Ukrainians scrambling to find ways to clear the explosives. New efforts to develop mine-clearing technology may help them push back Russia's invading forces.

Oleksandr Kryvtsov had enough.

The owner of an agricultural company in Hrakove, near Kharkiv, Kryvtsov found his land littered with land mines. That region of Ukraine, occupied by Russian forces for nearly eight months, had been pockmarked with explosive ordinances. The threat meant that farmers like Kryvtsov had to let their fields lay fallow. Even though Kryvstov’s fields were once part of Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine’s mine clearance teams were overworked and under-resourced.

So Kryvtsov came up with his own solution. He jimmyrigged a plow onto an old tractor, with massive steel rollers underneath. On the side, he painted the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. Kryvtsov connected a remote-control steering system and, from afar, he drove his Mad Max-style tractor over his fields, detonating any mines lurking under the soil.

The makeshift operation has worked well, Kryvtsov told Reuters, even clearing an anti-tank mine.

Kryvstov’s story is an example of incredible Ukrainian ingenuity—a nation of gilders, working to invent, adapt, and repurpose technology to defend themselves against a better-resourced, larger, determined enemy. But it’s also an ominous sign of just how bad the problem is.

In recent months, WIRED has investigated the technological challenges and opportunities facing Ukraine as it tries to defend itself and recapture its territory. One particular problem, unsung by the Western media but frequently cited by Ukrainian officials, are the haphazard minefields across Eastern Ukraine.

WIRED has spoken to a range of engineers, government officials, and humanitarian mine-clearance experts, and consulted Ukraine’s new mine clearance plan. It is apparent that Kyiv is prioritizing the problem, but without a significant new influx of money, personnel, and technology, the threat of these mines could hobble Ukraine’s economy, frustrate future counteroffensives, and pose a humanitarian crisis for decades to come.

A Humanitarian Crisis, an Economic Cost

Ukraine’s mine problem has been acute for a decade. The full-scale war with Russia has only made it worse. From 2014, when Russia first invaded, to the end of 2021, the United Nations says 312 Ukraines were killed by land mines. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Ukraine has recorded at least 269 civilian casualties, including 14 children. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has taken to calling Eastern Ukraine “the largest minefield in the world.”

Those casualty figures only capture the deaths on territory currently held by Ukraine. Behind the front lines, in the Russian-occupied regions of Eastern Ukraine, at least a hundred more have reportedly been killed.

“Twenty percent of the whole territory is dangerous,” Ihor Bezkaravainyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of finance, tells WIRED. “Right now we’re talking about 150,000 square kilometers.” (The total area, including water littered with naval mines, is nearly 175,000 km².)

Bezkaravainyi is a veteran of the war in Eastern Ukraine—he lost a leg to an anti-tank mine in 2016. He’s now responsible for coordinating the mine-clearance effort behind the front lines, giving Ukrainians back their property and recovering damaged agricultural lands. It’s not an easy task.

“It looks like the _zone rogue_ in France after World War One,” Bezkaravainyi says, referring to the areas near Germany and Belgium that remain contaminated by land mines to this day.

Conducting surveys to identify those mines will be a gargantuan challenge. Actually clearing them will be even more taxing.

Russia has deployed older anti-tank and anti-personnel mines—of the kind the world has ample experience dealing with. But it is believed that this is the first time the sophisticated PTKM-1R anti-tank mine, which detonates only when it picks up a certain seismic signature, has been used in battle. Russia has also made liberal use of the more advanced PFM-1 mine, also known as the “butterfly mine,” made mostly from plastic and liquid explosive. These mines are particularly odious because they can be scattered in huge quantities from afar or from the air, meaning that they are impossible to track. Because they are colorful and plastic, they can be mistaken by children as toys.

Beyond purpose-built mines, Russia has also littered Ukraine with unexploded munitions and “improvised explosive devices and booby traps,” according to a draft version of Kyiv’s plan to decontaminate the country, prepared late last year and provided to WIRED.

Until now, Ukraine has not had a national plan on how to deal with the mine problem—its ad hoc response has been split between the military, NGOs, a small number of private mine-clearance companies, and a small network of government mine-clearance operators.

In 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine had certified just four “mine action operators” to conduct the mine identification and clearance. Since the start of the war, that number has grown to “only 23.” That number is simply “not adequate,” the plan states.

This National Mine Action Strategy was devised to bring consistency and focus to this effort. But it warns that the scope of this problem “cannot be solved in a short-term perspective.” Kyiv hopes it can assess the entirety of its lands, to identify which areas are actually contaminated and which are safe to use, by 2029. By 2033, Ukraine aspires to have decontaminated 80 percent of its previously occupied territory. The strategy does not provide a date for when the whole country might be free of mines.

If Ukraine wants to meet these goals, it will need significantly more staff, technology, and equipment than it has now.

This will be a tough hill to climb. Humanitarian demining groups are spread thin across many global conflict zones, while commercial operators tend to be prohibitively expensive.

This is the reality that pushed Kryvtsov, the farmer, to take matters into his own hands. But Kyiv warns that these “black sappers”—unlicensed and unsanctioned mine-clearance operations—are dangerous and unreliable. Still, the government recognizes that, unless it can dramatically scale up its own operations, these freelance mine operators will become a popular choice for locals frustrated by the slow pace of progress.

Like many aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, Kyiv believes the solution is at home. The strategy calls for a substantial investment in Ukraine’s industrial capacity to produce mine-clearing equipment, research demining technology, and train demining teams. The World Bank estimated in early 2023 that the total cost of identifying and clearing these mines would be nearly $38 billion. Kyiv expects the true cost will be higher.

A Military Challenge

In the snow-covered fields near the front lines, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been deploying autonomous demining vehicles—which, although purpose-built and donated by European allies, look an awful lot like Kryvstov’s homemade version.

Since the start of the war, these military demining teams have cleared more than 280,000 mines—at a pace of more than 2,200 every week. Its work is entirely separate from the humanitarian teams run under Bezkaravainyi's department.

The military may have cleared a staggering volume, but the work is impeded by a lack of equipment. The military boasts 262 separate demining teams, but it has just six demining vehicles.

In an essay for _The Economist,_ former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi wrote that his forces were initially relying on “technically outdated pieces of equipment” to conduct this operational mine clearance. With Western donations, “it was possible to slightly augment the capabilities of engineer units … but given the unprecedented scale of these barriers, even such capabilities are objectively lacking.”

Much of the analysis of Ukraine’s failed summer counteroffensive has focused on the offensive gear it lacks—artillery shells, fighter jets, drones, and long-range missiles. But even if it had managed to pierce the Russian front line, Ukraine faced layers of other defensive structures, including between 15 and 20 kilometers of minefields.

As Zaluzhnyi notes, Russian reconnaissance drones have kept a watchful eye on these minefields, targeting any Ukrainian teams dispatched to clear them. “In case of successful mine barriers breaching, the enemy quickly restores minefields in these areas,” he wrote.

European allies, in particular, have donated mine clearance vehicles—including retrofitted German-made Leopard 2 tanks—but they have been hard hit by Russian forces.

While clearing fields near the front lines is difficult, risky work, Russia is capable of laying these fields remotely and quickly. The ISDM Zemledeliye, a mobile mine-laying system that sits on the back of a truck, can carry 50 rockets, each filled with anti-personnel or anti-tank mines that scatter over a targeted area. The system allows the operator to lay minefields from as far as 15 kilometers away. One pro-Kremlin Russian media outlet recently remarked that the Zemledeliye, which translates to “agriculture” in Russian, “sowed” the defeat of the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive.

“The Ukrainians didn't necessarily have the equipment, the type of trained brigades, etc, to break through that defense and overcome the Russians, who were defending in a doctrinally consistent and actually quite sound way,” Karolina Hird, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War and the deputy team lead for their Russia desk, tells WIRED. “Which brings us to where we are today.”

Even if Kyiv manages to overcome all of those other problems, if it cannot figure out how to clear the Russian-laid minefields, its progress risks being squandered.

“One of the big operational problems is, how do you increase by an order of magnitude the detection of mines, mapping of minefields, and the clearance of them—whilst denying the Russians visibility of them?” Mick Ryan, a 35-year veteran of the Australian Army who has traveled to Ukraine frequently during the war, tells WIRED. “And these are pretty significant problems, but they’re known problems, right?”

Ryan says there needs to be a deeper recalibration of the relationship between Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of the war, the transfer of knowledge and expertise from NATO to Ukraine may have been largely one-directional, but today, Ukraine’s expertise in modern warfare certainly rivals many of its benefactors.

“Ukrainians and NATO, they just need to divide up the problems and solve them,” Ryan says. “I mean, this isn't inventing the nuclear bomb.”

The Technology

As the National Mine Action Strategy notes, research on mine clearance has been sorely lacking.

There has been, the strategy says, a “lack of systematic and centralized work on the introduction of innovative technologies in the field of Mine Action, in particular, unmanned aerial vehicles, the use of satellite images, artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis systems.”

It’s a frustration that Federica Mezzani knows well. Since 2019, she’s been researching how new technologies can help improve mine detection strategies—but it is a field, she says, which had been “completely forgotten.”

Despite the fact that an estimated 110 million mines are still active around the world, they are primarily distributed in poor and war-torn countries. While NGOs such as the HALO Trust have worked to steadily decontaminate those territories, the research and development has been piecemeal and slow. It simply hasn’t been a priority.

But Mezzani, along with her colleagues in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome, set out to prove that new technology could help with this old problem. There had been some research testing how drones could be used to identify unexploded ordinances, but not much. Mezzani wanted to take it a step further, dispatching drone swarms equipped with ground-penetrating radar to methodically scan each section of the ground, the way a human team might. Algorithms could essentially automate mine detection, she believed.

In a series of small-scale experiments, Mezzani’s technique worked.

“The experimental campaign proved the effectiveness of the algorithm, which appears as a powerful tool to automatically detect buried objects with even small metal content,” reads her paper, published in _Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics_ in 2022.

“The technology is ready,” Mezzani tells WIRED. “I think that it's been ready for many years, actually.”

When the full-scale war began, research efforts like Mezzani’s were few and far between. That meant figuring out these strategies from the ground up.

Part of the challenge is about confidence. As Bezkaravainyi explains, humanitarian mine clearance operates on a zero-tolerance policy for civilian deaths—if they mark a territory as uncontaminated, they must be absolutely sure it is entirely safe. Where possible, that also means defusing the land mines instead of exploding them and further contaminating the soil.

This process is significantly slower than how the military clears territory. Prioritizing speed, the army may blast a path through an active minefield in order to advance quickly without fully clearing it. To that end, humanitarian mine clearance operates on the Swiss cheese model: applying multiple imperfect strategies on top of each other.

Bezkaravainyi explains that their process normally involves consulting high-resolution satellite imagery of the territory and identifying land mines from the sky. From there, drones may be dispatched to confirm those locations and identify mines that may be buried or tough to spot. After that, teams are dispatched to sweep the territory.

Last fall, at an international conference on Ukraine’s demining efforts held in Zagreb, Bezkaravainyi’s department unveiled a prototype, developed by American surveillance technology giant Palantir, which used artificial intelligence to help inform how Kyiv approaches mine clearance.

This multilayered approach is increasingly necessary. Magnetometers and thermal scanners, which identify mines by identifying the metal amidst the organic material, were once the gold standard for mine identification. Some mines have electromagnetic shields, protecting them from ground-penetrating radar. The PFM-1 mine, in particular, contains very little metal, making it difficult to detect.

This problem is mostly, but not entirely, of Russia’s making. Reports suggest that Ukraine has also deployed these PFM-1 mines against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine.

Difficult terrain, such as forests or mud, makes this work more difficult. Ukraine has difficult terrain in spades: It even has a word, _bezdorizhzhya_, for the mud that covers the eastern part of the country in the spring.

“If all the technologies in the world were given to Ukraine, it would not be enough,” Bezkaravainyi says.

An Opportunity

Ukraine is not merely contemplating how to buy and acquire enough technology to do this job—they are developing a plan to become a world leader on mine clearance.

That sort of focus has been sorely lacking for decades. “It’s a type of research that doesn't bring in profits,” Mezzani says. It’s a problem she crashed into during her own research project. “I wouldn't say that we have a technological issue. We have a willingness issue.”

Some 70 countries worldwide are still contaminated by land mines, according to the United Nations, and they kill or maim thousands every year. Most, however, are located in the Global South. The conflict in Ukraine may finally be the impetus to develop the technology and expertise to address that problem.

Indeed, Bezkaravainyi says his department has fielded plenty of offers from companies professing expertise in mine clearance, but many have been unreliable, haven’t delivered, or were outright scams.

If Ukraine can develop both the technology and the industry to do this work, it could provide a critical advantage in the war, boost its battered economy, and provide an enormous service to the entire world.

Brave1, a platform launched by the Ukrainian government to identify innovative projects and connect them to public and private financing, has identified mine clearance as one of its main priorities. Thus far, 30 projects—which range from autonomous land vehicles to more sophisticated detection systems—are part of the Brave1 platform.

If the Ukrainian government can spur the creation of a domestic demining industry, it will speed up its economic recovery, help war-torn countries the world over, and maybe even help win the war.

The Danger Lurking Just Below Ukraine's Surface

Plus: State-backed hackers test out generative AI, the US takes down a major Russian military botnet, and 100 hospitals in Romania go offline amid a major ransomware attack.

While the response to Cowles’ tale has been a mix of praise and mockery, experts in online threats say it’s foolish to think you’re too savvy to never fall for a professional scammer. “The reality is, criminals perpetuating fraud—whether via phone, email, or social media—are very good at social engineering,” says Selena Larson, a senior threat intelligence analyst at security firm Proofpoint, who describes Cowles as “extremely courageous.”

Manipulative tactics the scammers used against Cowles are common. They include, Larson says, “making someone afraid for themselves or their families, making them excited or enticed by the possibility of money or romance, or any number of heightened emotions to push them into making decisions they otherwise wouldn’t.” To protect yourself from scams like the one that hooked Cowles, Larson suggests being on high alert for anyone trying to isolate you from people in your life, and don’t trust someone posing as a government employee or celebrity. “Forcing a sense of urgency,” like asking for money immediately, is also a huge red flag. “If people are worried they are being targeted by fraudsters,” Larson says, “they should immediately break off contact and report the activity.”

Or you can adopt Cowles' new tactic: Never answer the phone.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are all the rage—including among hackers working on behalf of Russia, China, and North Korea, according to research published this week by Microsoft and OpenAI. While researchers note that they have “not identified significant attacks” that use large language models like those powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they did find widespread use of generative AI tools for research, reconnaissance, “basic scripting tasks,” and ways to improve code used to carry out cyberattacks. “Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet observed particularly novel or unique AI-enabled attack or abuse techniques resulting from threat actors’ usage of AI,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post outlining the research. “However, Microsoft and our partners continue to study this landscape closely.”

The US Department of Justice announced this week that it had disrupted a botnet controlled by APT28, a hacking group known as Fancy Bear that operates under Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. According to the DOJ, the hackers infected hundreds of routers used by homes and businesses with the “Moobot” malware, which the DOJ says is linked to a cybercriminal group. Fancy Bear hackers then used to Moobot to “install their own bespoke scripts and files that repurposed the botnet, turning it into a global cyber espionage platform,” according to the DOJ. To seize control of the botnet, the US government also used the Moobot malware to delete “stolen and malicious data” in the routers and then tweaked the routers’ firewalls to prevent the hackers from accessing them remotely. US attorney general Merrick Garland praised the operation in a statement as a successful effort to “dismantle the Russian government’s malicious cyber tools that endanger the security of the United States and our allies.”

Ransomware attacks frequently target hospitals, but few have had as widespread an impact as a strike against Romania’s health care system this week. Approximately 100 hospitals took their systems offline after attackers hit a popular hospital management system. Romanian officials say 25 hospitals had their data encrypted by the ransomware, which targeted the Hipocrate Information System (HIS) on the night of February 11. Another 75 hospitals voluntarily took their systems offline to avoid possible infection. The disruption has forced the hospitals to revert to paper records. The attackers, who have not yet been identified, demanded a ransom of 3.5 bitcoin, or around $180,000, to decrypt the files.

How to Not Get Scammed Out of $50,000

The prototype satellites hitched a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket.

Two prototype satellites for the Missile Defense Agency and four missile-tracking satellites for the US Space Force rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Wednesday from Florida's Space Coast.

These satellites are part of a new generation of spacecraft designed to track hypersonic missiles launched by China or Russia and perhaps emerging missile threats from Iran or North Korea, which are developing their own hypersonic weapons.

Hypersonic missiles are smaller and more maneuverable than conventional ballistic missiles, which the US military's legacy missile defense satellites can detect when they launch. Infrared sensors on the military's older-generation missile tracking satellites are tuned to pick out bright thermal signatures from missile exhaust.

The New Threat Paradigm

Hypersonic missiles represent a new challenge for the Space Force and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). For one thing, ballistic missiles follow a predictable parabolic trajectory that takes them into space. Hypersonic missiles are smaller and comparatively dim, and they spend more time flying in Earth's atmosphere. Their maneuverability makes them difficult to track.

A nearly five-year-old military organization called the Space Development Agency (SDA) has launched 27 prototype satellites over the last year to prove the Pentagon's concept for a constellation of hundreds of small, relatively low-cost spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. This new fleet of satellites, which the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, will eventually number hundreds of spacecraft to track missiles and relay data about their flight paths down to the ground. The tracking data will provide an early warning to those targeted by hypersonic missiles and help generate a firing solution for interceptors to shoot them down.

The SDA constellation combines conventional tactical radio links, laser inter-satellite communications, and wide-view infrared sensors. The agency, now part of the Space Force, plans to launch successive generations, or tranches, of small satellites, each introducing new technology. The SDA's approach relies on commercially available spacecraft and sensor technology and will be more resilient to attack from an adversary than the military's conventional space assets. Those legacy military satellites often cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars apiece, with architectures that rely on small numbers of large satellites that might appear like a sitting duck to an adversary determined to inflict damage.

Four of the small SDA satellites and two larger spacecraft for the Missile Defense Agency were aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when it lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:30 pm EST (2230 UTC) Wednesday.

The rocket headed northeast from Cape Canaveral to place the six payloads into low-Earth orbit. Officials from the Space Force declared the launch a success later Wednesday evening.

The SDA's four tracking satellites, built by L3Harris, are the last spacecraft the agency will launch in its prototype constellation, called Tranche 0. Beginning later this year, the SDA plans to kick off a rapid-fire launch campaign with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance to quickly build out its operational Tranche 1 constellation, with launches set to occur at one-month intervals to deploy approximately 150 satellites. Then, there will be a Tranche 2 constellation with more advanced sensor technologies.

The primary payloads aboard Wednesday's launch were for the Missile Defense Agency. These two Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) satellites, one supplied by L3Harris and the other by Northrop Grumman, will demonstrate medium field-of-view sensors. Those sensors can't cover as much territory as the SDA satellites but will provide more sensitive and detailed missile tracking data.

“Our advanced satellites on orbit will bring the integrated and resilient missile warning and defense capabilities the US requires against adversaries developing more advanced maneuverable missiles,” said Christopher Kubasik, chairman and CEO of L3Harris. “L3Harris delivered this advanced missile tracking capability on behalf of MDA and SDA on orbit in just over three years after work was authorized to proceed. We are proud to be a critical part of the new space sensing architecture.”

The HBTSS satellites, valued at more than $300 million, and the SDA's tracking prototypes will participate in joint military exercises in the coming months, where the wide-view SDA satellites will provide "cueing data" to the MDA's HBTSS spacecraft. The narrower field of view of the HBTSS satellites can provide more specific, target-quality data to a ground-based interceptor, according to a report last year published by the Congressional Research Service. Future tranches, or generations, of SDA satellites will incorporate the medium field-of-view sensing capability flying on the MDA's HBTSS satellites.

With SDA taking over the responsibility for making this technology operational, that will leave the MDA, which has historically flown its own missile-tracking satellites, focused on next-generation sensor development, an MDA spokesperson told Ars.

Military officials decided only last year to place the four SDA satellites on the same launch as the MDA's HBTSS mission. With all six satellites flying in the same orbital plane, there will be opportunities to see the same targets with both types of spacecraft and sensors. These targets may include scheduled US military missile tests or foreign launches.

"The intent is to be able to work with cooperative and noncooperative targets to be able to do our demonstrations," a senior SDA official said during a background briefing.

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica._

Source

Wired