Effective combat against the new wave of telephone and electronic spam terrorism – mass calls and messages about bombs at many different sites – at the current level of technological development will require new technical solutions and approaches, as well as closer international cooperation between law enforcement agencies.

On Tuesday, another epidemic of electronic terrorism, which swept across the country from east to west, reached the capital region: the police, rescuers, administrations of many state institutions, schools and shopping centers received calls and (or) false reports about mining facilities. In Moscow and the region, police checked more than 200 facilities: universities, schools, shopping centers, the staff and visitors of which were evacuated. None of the reports were confirmed.

Law enforcement sources (the intelligence agencies have not made any official statements) told news agencies that many of the calls and letters lead, in particular, to Ukraine. Similar hints about a Ukrainian connection were heard in the fall of 2017, when the previous major wave of telephone terrorism swept across Russia (the Ministry of Internal Affairs recorded 3,027 messages). In the end, the telephone terrorists turned out to be Russians operating from abroad, said FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov. Their names and subsequent fates are unknown.

Current claims about a Ukrainian trace also do not look very convincing. Since the 1990s, when telephone terrorism became known in Russia, it has changed a lot. The previous algorithms for searching for callers by phone number and voice, as well as by profile (schools were often “mined” by careless students wanting to disrupt a test, government agencies and clinics – by offended visitors and patients, shops and commercial companies – competitors) are partly outdated. The work of the special services is complicated by the development of Internet telephony: telephone terrorists now, as a rule, use mobile IP addresses, which do not allow determining where the caller is physically located – in Russia, Ukraine or Vanuatu (which calls into question the reliability of information about the Ukrainian trace), in addition, spam miners use bots that generate calls or send email messages to a list. It is extremely difficult to identify the entire chain of traffic and reach the real telephone terrorist, believes Alexander Baranov, head of the Department of Information Security at the Higher School of Economics, which is why the percentage of such crimes solved is low (although, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the effectiveness of the fight against spam terrorists is growing: in 2017, 28.5% of cases of false reports of terrorist attacks were solved, in January-November 2018 - 49.3%).

The latest telephone terrorism is a challenge to the special services, which do not spoil the public with convincing evidence of their success in this area. The technological nature of such crime requires new approaches, technological solutions, and possibly the expansion of international cooperation from law enforcement, rather than repeating the usual words about the sinister Ukrainian trace “under the source”.

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