Report: Panic around Putin following the assassination of Khamenei

The news in brief:

• Russia has temporarily disabled Putin’s camera-related security system.
• The main concern was that Ukraine, or another hostile entity, would be able to collect intelligence similar to the “Israeli plan”.
• The head of the security services in Russia warned that the camera system may turn “from an asset to a weak point”.
• Through artificial intelligence: Israeli intelligence distilled millions of hours of photography into patterns and clues.
• Many countries have begun to reexamine their camera arrays.
• It is believed that Ukraine is already able to access some of the systems in Russia.
  

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Russia has temporarily disabled parts of a special surveillance and security system designed to protect President Vladimir Putin and senior government officials close to him, following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, the Financial Times reported today (Monday).

The main concern in Russia was that hostile elements, with an emphasis on Ukraine, would gain access to the camera and surveillance system in Moscow, and would be able to use a method similar to the one Israel used to process the information. According to the report, Russia recognized the intelligence move carried out by Israel in preparation for the assassination of Khamenei as an intelligence shock and an unprecedented breakthrough.

The security system in question in Russia is a separate system from the massive array of cameras used to monitor the residents of Moscow, which includes nearly 300,000 cameras, according to the report. The security system was disabled after the assassination of Khamenei, and was reactivated only after engineers went through it in an attempt to completely isolate it from the Internet and reduce as much as possible the risk of external intrusion.

The unusual steps were taken after, according to the report, Israeli intelligence managed to obtain huge amounts of documentation and hours of footage from traffic cameras in Iran. The information was used to precisely locate the location and timing of the senior meeting that took place on February 28 between Khamenei and his advisers and senior regime officials at his residence in Tehran. Several senior Iranian security officials were killed at that meeting, which was attacked in the opening stages of the joint US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic.

The event caused widespread concern among security officials around the world because it illustrated the new capabilities of artificial intelligence in the field of surveillance. Today’s technology makes it possible to analyze millions of hours of video collected from thousands of cameras, identify behavior patterns and find specific targets quickly and efficiently that were not possible before.

The head of the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov, warned regional security officials last week that Russia’s vast surveillance system could turn from a strategic asset into a weak point. According to him, the assassination of senior Iranian officials by the “American-Israeli alliance” is a “clear warning sign”. He claimed that the location of the victims was located, among other things, through “back doors” in the software of the Iranian surveillance systems.

Intelligence experts point out that for years it was known that security cameras could be a target for infiltration by hackers or intelligence agencies. However, in recent years there has been a significant change due to progress in the field of artificial intelligence. Instead of being satisfied with recognizing faces, vehicles or predefined objects, the new systems are able to perform complex searches using natural language.

For example, it is possible to search within huge video archives for events such as two people passing a bag to each other, a person who changed his appearance several times during the day, or a vehicle that drove repeatedly in the same area in a short period of time.

Israeli intelligence officers took advantage of these capabilities to map the complex geography of Tehran, identify activity patterns of senior security guards, and separate targets from millions of hours of footage gathered from thousands of cameras. The information was combined with other intelligence sources, including human sources.

Security and intelligence officials in several countries have expressed concern about the new capability, which they say turns multibillion-dollar investments in security and traffic camera systems into a potential source of intelligence for adversaries. After identifying a certain person, the systems are able to quickly build a comprehensive file on his activities for months, including his life patterns and the people he is in contact with.

The systems do not rely only on security cameras. They are also able to integrate information from social networks, hacked communications, audio data from smart devices and travel history.

The fear of turning the surveillance systems against the countries themselves has led security officials in many countries to re-examine the security level of their camera networks. However, experts point out that this is a particularly complex task, because most surveillance systems consist of many generations of cameras and different software systems.

In Russia anyway there is a high sensitivity around Putin’s personal security. According to the report, the Russian authorities have been worried for a long time about the capabilities of the Ukrainian intelligence services, which in the past managed to penetrate traffic cameras in Russia and even used the location data of cell phones for the purpose of eliminating senior Russian military officials in the heart of Moscow.

Despite the measures taken, the threat has not completely disappeared. An independent Ukrainian hacker said that cameras in Moscow, and even around the Kremlin, “still work and are regularly hacked.” However, he refused to say whether Ukraine currently has the ability to analyze all the information received from them on a large scale.

The report notes that China has also begun investing in cameras and new software based on artificial intelligence, capable of interpreting scenes, recognizing patterns of behavior and locating video clips through text commands. But at the same time, security officials warn that as countries expand their surveillance systems, they may create new vulnerabilities for themselves that can be exploited from the outside.