Dossier Center
Dossier Center
IT Prigogine. How the digital infrastructure of "Putin's chef" is organized Yevgeny Prigozhin is engaged in many unrelated things: he feeds schoolchildren and Putin, runs a troll factory, mines diamonds and throws convicts to storm Bakhmut. From the side…
What are the servers of Prigozhin's business empire hiding?
1⃣ Who works with the "Troll Factory". On Saturday, we released a large investigation into how Prigozhin's IT infrastructure works. For those who missed (or failed), - we retell the most important thing in the telegram. The expanse of the "Troll Factory" is social networks.
They practically do not produce their own content , they prefer to work where they can
use someone else's and buy ads according to gray schemes . In Vkontakte, they oversee news projects -
Shark, Daring Square, How do you like it, Elon Musk, Stripe, Treshach, Minced meat, Mud warehouse, etc. On Twitter "Factory"
buys publications, retweets and likes from thousands of political accounts. In Telegram, the “trolls” paid for publications from third-party channels, for example,
“Media Technologist”, “Something Like This” and “338”,
paid for reposts on the Karaulny channel, bought places in selections and ratings, and purchased subscriber boost services. To promote its project "Yarus" "Troll Factory" ordered advertising from popular channels:
● " How I met tetanus"; ● "Lentach"; ● "Only to anyone"; ● "Durov's Code"; ● "Anti-gloss"; ● "Heavenly"; ● Yaplakal; ● FemaleMems ; In addition to buying someone else's content, the "trolls" administer their own telegram channels , and not some, but pseudo-opposition ones (
here is a list of them). They received the green light to create such channels in 2020 directly from the Kremlin.
The Troll Factory has its own media network: NovInfo, Nevskiye Novosti, Ekonomika Segodnya, and the Federal News Agency (FAN). Despite this, they
could pay for the publications Prigozhin needed in high-profile publications - Literaturnaya Gazeta and Kommersant. Accommodation in the latter in the winter of 2021
could cost Prigozhin 750 thousand rubles .
And from 2018 or 2019 , Daria Dugina worked in the Patriot media group until her death . She was responsible for the foreign direction, including organizing Prigozhin's publications and comments in the Turkish media.
2⃣ Military commentators
Since Russia attacked Ukraine, "
military commentators " who analyze military actions have begun to gain popularity on the Internet. This happened to Yuriy Podolyaka: in the spring of 2022, the number of his subscribers on YouTube
exceeded 2 million people. True, the video platform blocked his channel "for violating the terms of use." Thanks to a leak from the servers of Prigozhin's companies, we learned that
Podolyaka's work was paid for by the Troll Factory .
It turned out that Prigozhin
began to finance "military correspondents" and military analysts long before the start of a full-scale invasion . For example, the "military writer"
Vladlen Tatarsky, aka Maxim Fomin, also
received at least 70 thousand rubles for promoting the necessary theses back in 2021, follows from internal documents.
Rybar (Mikhail Zvinchuk), Abbas Juma and the military observer Colonel Cassad (Boris Rozhin)
also work with Prigozhin . Mikhail Zvinchuk in one of the documents was listed
as the head of the international direction of the Troll Factory. Together with him,
49 more people worked in the department . They promoted the theses of the "trolls" in their telegram channels:
➔ "Wings of War";
➔ "Lu Man: Looking East";
➔ "Brussels snitch";
➔ "India Today";
➔ "American number";
➔ Center for Violations of Human Rights;
➔ "Fifth Republic";
➔ "South wind";
➔ "Beekeeper";
➔ "Tales from the favelas" and others.
3⃣ The main "troll" Prigozhin
The head of the "Troll Factory" is called the former journalist of RIA Novosti
Ilya Gorbunov . Since 2019, he actually
manages the Patriot media group, since 2020 - the Factory itself and pseudo-opposition Telegram channels.
For example, Gorbunov could
lead the administrators of the Scanner Project telegram channel, who were detained in 2022 on charges of extorting money from the heroes of their publications.
Gorbunov also
oversees "special tasks" in the personal interests of Prigozhin . Here's what they included:
Organization
of bullying on the Internet Lyubov Sobol . A project called "Sable Hunting" in 2019
was spent from 700 thousand to 1.7 million rubles a month .
The work
of informants in the headquarters of the opposition in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the opposition media, the liberal environment and other public groups. On average, they received
from 15,000 to 25,000 rubles a month .
Discrediting the governor of St. Petersburg Alexander Beglov.
Collection of compromising evidence on Alexander Vinokurov,
the son-in-law of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. According to the source, compromising evidence was needed
to blackmail Lavrov himself .
4⃣ How Putin's chef encrypts his data (not very successful)
Initially, Prigozhin’s employees
used ordinary disposable cell phones with left SIM cards, but then they switched to
SMP-Atlas / 2 cryptophones - they are more difficult to listen to. Later, due to the growing numbers,
the mercenaries began to use a cheap home-made version of the crypto-smartphone - they are called "closed" phones. These are
smartphones (most often Samsung) with a customized version of Android . They use the OpenVPN protocol with self-signed certificates to create an encrypted network between devices and a central server. They have their own
secret messenger and mail, which work inside Prigozhin's VPN. This scheme would be reliable,
but the central servers can be accessed from Concord's internal network, and it is open to almost the entire Internet.
Yevgeny Prigozhin himself uses the Psion organizer for secrecy - it is not connected to the Internet and runs on batteries. But
backup copies of the organizer, contact book and its schedule are uploaded to the same servers. All structures of Prigozhin's business empire
are interconnected, information is stored on the same servers . They are not served by the most qualified IT specialists, and their work
is organized chaotically. Prigozhin's employees
are careless about data protection. They used
the same passwords and kept them
in ordinary text files , sent each other
files with server addresses, logins, passwords and user certificates. Also, Prigozhin’s employees repeatedly
used free public hosting services (“Yandex.Disk”,
Mail.ru ) to transfer files containing sensitive information - for example, they posted copies of their databases and lists of full names and addresses of tens of thousands of residents of the military camps they serve.
5⃣ Prigozhin in Europe
Prigozhin's employees
installed computer equipment in rented apartments abroad - in those countries where the "trolls" were active.
For example,
in France, political strategists under the leadership of Jeyhun Aslanov tried to promote
a radical agenda in social networks and rented an apartment for equipment in Nice. The earliest such case was
recorded in April 2014.
Abroad, Prigozhin's IT projects
rent hundreds of hostings. As of September 2021, the main supplier for the Troll Factory was hosting
inferno.name -
it is registered in the UK. More than 60 servers of Prigozhin's structure are rented from the Russian hosting
timeweb.ru (addresses in the Russian Federation,
Kazakhstan, EU ), a few dozen more - in
netbreeze.net (
Europe, Asia, USA). Several servers are rented
from Ukrainian hosting thehost.com.ua and American digitalocean.com .
Also, Prigozhin’s employees rented servers from the German hosting provider Hetzner for several years to use as a VPN and watch movies while in Syria, Sudan and the Central African Republic. Probably, the server owners
do not even suspect who their client is .
And also
Prigozhin’s employees buy tickets abroad and pay for the Internet for his mother Violetta – she
was recently sanctioned due to the lack of visible connections with her son’s business. Now the EU court
has a reason to reconsider its decision.
To read more details from our investigation into Prigozhin's IT infrastructure, scroll up
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