Imagine being in bed, sound asleep, when your country’s emergency alert system suddenly goes off on your phone. Scary stuff. Now imagine that same emergency alert was announcing an alien invasion was taking place. What would you think?
Thousands of people in Brazil don’t have to imagine what that would be like because hackers recently sent fake alien invasion warnings at 1:30 in the morning via the country’s emergency alert system.
According to G1 Globo, between this past Friday night and the early hours of Saturday, the National Civil Defense issued warnings to residents in at least seven Brazilian cities. The agency later reported that the warning was sent out remotely by someone without authorization and may have been the result of a hacker attack.
In one of the alerts, residents of the city of Belo Horizonte said the message told them: “Protect yourselves: ALIEN ATTACK, PEOPLE, WE HAVE ARRIVED.” In Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the message appeared with what appeared to be errors and no real context: “misantropo ADRESS RJ burros dms pprt.”
The characters “misantropi4” are an alphanumeric representation of part of the Portuguese word “misantropia” (mistrust of people), a technique commonly used by hackers called “leatspeak,” according to Gigazine.
A person on X claimed they were behind the ‘alien invasion’ hack
The Federal Police have taken over the investigation. So far, authorities have not identified a suspect, but an X account, @mizantropiaz, claimed responsibility for the attack and showed how they hacked the emergency alert system.
International Cyber Digest reports that an investigation has shown that the information-stealing malware “Infostealer” infected at least one Brazilian government IT official. They believe that a malicious game installer may have infected the IT official’s home gaming PC while he was working on government infrastructure, allowing the hacker to steal browser data containing passwords and government VPN credentials. The hacker may also have used extremely old credentials that the government employee had not updated in many years.