“Important stories”: a Moscow IT company, commissioned by security forces, creates programs for Internet isolation, surveillance and troll factories

Vulkan, a small Moscow-based IT company commissioned by the Ministry of Defense, the FSB and the Foreign Intelligence Service, is developing software to spy on Internet users, Russian cyberattacks, manage a troll factory and isolate the Internet, according to an investigation by Important Stories and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as The Guardian . Washington Post, Paper Trail Media and more.

The journalists analyzed the archive of documents about spyware, which were given to them by an anonymous source.

As specified in the investigation, the office of Vulkan, whose founders are Anton Markov and Alexander Irzhavsky, is located in the north-east of Moscow, the company employs a little more than 130 people. The company's revenue in 2021 amounted to more than a billion rubles.

One of the major clients of Vulkan, in particular, was military unit 33949 (one of the units of the SVR), military unit 64829 (Centre for Information Security of the FSB), the journalists point out.

For the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, as investigators say, the company developed software under the code "Amezit". According to the documentation, it should

monitor all Internet users in a given territory, block "unwanted" sites, and instead impose propaganda articles promoted by bots,

said in the investigation.

Experts interviewed by Important Stories suggest that this system was created for use abroad, including in Ukraine.

This software has a subsystem, which is essentially a control point for a huge troll factory, the journalists say.

According to the investigation, these trolls may be involved in the 2017 Twitter campaign, when, during the parliamentary elections in Armenia, bots distributed a false letter from the US Agency for International Development on the social network about the interference of American authorities in the voting. Also, the Vulcan trolls participated in the campaign against Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, investigators say.