- Millions of Brazilians received an unauthorized government warning
- The text simply read ‘misanthropi4’ and it is unknown who sent it
- The government has denied it was responsible and is pointing the finger at hackers
If you’re based in the US, you may be familiar with AMBER Alerts, also known as Wireless Emergency Alerts, which are mass broadcast messages sent to every smartphone in a designated area. Several other nations have similar platforms in place, including Brazil — but many Brazilians recently learned that their emergency alert system wasn’t quite as secure as they might have hoped.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, millions of Brazilians were jolted by a mysterious message from the country’s alarm system. The alert level was classified as “extreme”, and worryingly, it is believed to be the work of hackers rather than any official agency.
The message, which was sent to civilians in the southern state of Paraná and the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, among others, simply read “misanthropy4”. It is an approximation of the Portuguese word “misanthropy” (with the last A swapped for a 4). As with the English word “misanthropy,” it means hatred or distrust of humanity.
The message was accompanied by a loud alarm sound normally reserved for particularly severe thunderstorms. As the text message was sent shortly after midnight local time, it ensured that many people were woken up in the middle of the night.
Brazilian authorities said the emergency messaging system was taken offline after a probable hacker attack, suggesting this was more than just a simple text sent out by mistake by the government. In fact, there was no event or natural disaster serious enough to warrant the alert being activated at the time, further pointing to bad actors being responsible.
A potentially devastating attack
The fact that hackers were able to breach a government system that has the potential to communicate with any mobile device in a given area of the country has troubling implications, both for the ways civilians could be manipulated and for the security of government institutions as a whole.
A text from a known government source is likely to have more trust than one from an unknown number. With access to Brazil’s emergency broadcast system, hackers could potentially send out fraudulent messages that could have a greater impact than usual. It opens the door to all kinds of sinister activities.
So far, this attack appears to have had relatively little impact. For many Brazilians posting on social media, the text was more confusing than anything else.
For example, Last-Educator3947 on Reddit said “I live in the city where the alert was first sent. It was five minutes after the Brazil x Haiti World Cup match. My anxious brain associated misanthropy with a violent attack on people celebrating in the streets after the game. I thought it was an incel Discord hacker sending a message to launch a purge-style attack.” They then added: “I’m laughing now, but I hardly slept last night.”
Reddit user Magnon, meanwhile, summed up the situation by saying that it “Sounds like an anime villain just arose.”
According to the International Cyber Digest newsletter on X, this breach could be connected to a previous hack of a Brazilian government employee who was infected with an info thief. International Cyber Digest claims stolen credentials included public logins, emails, development and staging environments and more.
Whether this is what gave hackers access to the Brazilian government’s alarm system is not yet known. Either way, it demonstrates the power that hackers can achieve if they find a way into supposedly secure government systems. While this alarming saga turned out to be relatively harmless, that may not be the case next time.
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