Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say
Elon Musk’s company, once hailed for aiding the besieged country, now appears to be helping its invaders as well.
Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say::undefined
The idea that they aren’t able to come up with a credit card with a Ukrainian name that looks 100% legitimate to a billing company is farcical.
I see you don't know how credit card numbers work. You may also not be aware of the fact that credit cards aren't working in Russia for almost 2 years.
Let me just ask you point blank, do you think the CIA could manage to purchase a Starlink, activate it, and use it, without anyone having any idea it was the CIA that did all that?
Just one or two is easy to manage. A dozen is much more difficult already, provided Starlink manages some security and has access to metadata (data that ultimately can't be faked such as location, accounts, device id).
… meaning that one of their many worldwide operatives could just get a credit card. Like, say, in Ukraine.
You’re focused way too hard on “following the law and doing things by the book” without realizing Russia is more of a “do what it takes.”
Yeah okay. Let's say we covered the billing. What about devices id, their origin and location? Those are not purchased through Ukraine and Starlink is ought to know that.
Who says they weren’t purchased in Ukraine?
They can't be. Ukraine must have them under full control because they rely on them too much.
Also it's much easier to assume that these modules, like any other modern tech these days are bought by Russia through other countries who it still does business with like China, Turkey etc.
You’re essentially saying “Tesla has to know, because it’s easier to believe that they do.”
Welp, Musk clearly isn't even interested in exploring the possibility and just calls it fake news. I guess you won the argument by essentially saying "Nobody knows and no one needs to try".
Not at all my point. My point was that it can be unknowable. And we have no idea if anyone has tried.
You literally said it in your first comment here:
At that point, you cant tell the difference.
I also don't exactly buy the possibility of Russian intelligence agencies being able to do stuff like this adequately. As anything else in Russia, they degraded seriously under Putin's regime. They might not even be involved - I wouldn't be surprised if those Starlink modules were just a nice opportunity found by whatever volunteers buying stuff like drones from Aliexpress and sending it to Russian army. Reports say they were purchased from UAE.
This isn’t some super difficult covert operation. The objective is to purchase a Starlink dish without it being obvious it’s being used by the Russian military. Apart from the fact that Russians were already living in Ukraine before the war, who likely already had Starlink, it’s trivial to purchase these things. They aren’t some super secret item, or locked down to government use only, it’s a consumer item that can be bought for “relatively” cheap, and doesn’t really have a method to do a deep dive into the background of every purchaser (not to mention, people would get pissed if a deep background check was done for every purchase.)
At that point, you cant tell the difference.
This is referring to the data. Unless you’re suggesting the Russian military is incapable of using a VPN, something literal children have used on their own to bypass school restrictions.
Puchasing anything through Ukraine is unviable at the thought level from the perspective of Russian army. Hence why it's much more likely to come from elsewhere.
Using VPN for what purpose exactly? VPN won't deliver you a device from Ukraine. VPN won't change your physical location.
Russian military was using Ukraine's own mobile operators and its talks has been recorded (and locations discovered probably) many times thanks to that. Yes, they are stupid enough to not know about messengers sometimes.
Since when can you not spoof any of that? Grab a used android phone from local used market. Put any rooted rom on it. Spoof the gps... Device id is irrelevant at that point. As for origin, not sure what you mean by that, you can just order the starlink equipment to a random address in a different country, it will look legit. As others said, it's trivial to bypass/spoof all that metadata.
Once you got the connection up and running you just use a vpn to hide everyrhing.
The only thing they could do is block starlink for a whole region, that would affect everyone in there. But you still couldn't distinguish who is using the service.
you don't even need to root to spoof gps, you can just do that on android
Since when can you not spoof any of that? Grab a used android phone from local used market. Put any rooted rom on it. Spoof the gps… Device id is irrelevant at that point.
Starlink modules are not Android devices.
Device ids should be required for pairing with the satellite from my understanding. Same with IMEI on smartphones - except it should be useless to try to fake it as the number of devices is magnitudes lower than smartphones and it should be possible to pin-point any misbehaving device.
Spoofing GPS is not exactly useful. Starlink satellites are very low-orbit so again misbehavior should be detectable. I mean you can connect to some satellite but if you report location that should be served by a different satellite then you got yourself caught.
you can just order the starlink equipment to a random address in a different country
Starlink is shipping devices to Ukraine directly for the military it seems. It should know the difference between these and others that are shipped all over the world by anyone.
Once you got the connection up and running you just use a vpn to hide everyrhing.
VPN is out of scope for this I think. It's about locating the device physically by the provider, not about specific sites trying to watch actual internet activity.
they could do is block starlink for a whole region
They are already doing this but not the whole region. Occupied territories of Ukraine are selectively blocked according to their own availability map.