"Important Stories": A little-known IT company, commissioned by the Russian Ministry of Defense, creates programs to isolate the Internet, conduct cyberattacks, and manage a "troll factory"

The little-known Russian IT company Vulkan is developing software for surveillance, cyberattacks, managing a troll factory, and isolating the Internet on behalf of the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, and the SVR, according to a joint investigation by Vazhnye Istorii and Süddeutsche Zeitung. An anonymous source provided the journalists with documents about Vulkan.

According to Important Stories, the office of the Scientific and Technical Center Vulcan is located in the northeast of Moscow, and the company employs just over 130 people. The founders of the company are Anton Markov and Alexander Irzhavsky. Vulcan's total revenue for 2021 amounted to just over a billion rubles.

The publication names military units 33949 (a division of the SVR) and 64829 (the FSB Information Security Center) as the center's major clients. According to journalists, over the past three years, both units have transferred more than 300 million rubles to the company for the development of various programs.

However, the main development of the company, which journalists learned about, is a program codenamed “Amesit”, which “Vulkan” created by order of the Russian Ministry of Defense.

According to the documents, this program was supposed to monitor all Internet users in the specified territory, as well as block websites that the agency considered undesirable, redirecting users to approved resources.

In addition, the program was supposed to increase the efficiency of disseminating “special materials.” This subsystem, “Important Stories,” was described as “the control center of a huge troll factory,” with the help of which a Defense Ministry employee could create hundreds of bots in a variety of social networks “in one click.”

Experts interviewed by journalists suggested that Amesit was created for use abroad, including in Ukraine. One of the main conditions for the operation of the complex was physical access to telecommunications equipment, Vazhnye Istorii notes.

Journalists failed to find information about where and how the part of Amesit responsible for isolating the Internet was used. However, they found examples of how the “promotion of special materials” worked. In particular, journalists found information about the participation of Vulkan bots in the campaign against Hillary Clinton before the US presidential elections in 2016 and in the promotion of a conspiracy theory about the murder of their colleague, Colonel Maksym Shapoval, by Ukrainian special services in 2017.

In conclusion, Important Stories emphasizes that Vulkan's participation in developing software for the Russian military was previously unknown. The journalists also noted that the company is not on the sanctions lists of either the US or the EU.