- Millions of Brazilians received an unauthorized government alert
- The text simply said ‘misanthropi4’ and it is unknown who sent it
- Government denies responsibility and points fingers at hackers
If you live in the US, you may be aware of AMBER alerts, also known as wireless emergency alerts, which are mass broadcast messages sent to all smartphones in a designated area. Several other countries have similar platforms, including Brazil, but many Brazilians recently discovered that their emergency alert system was not as secure as they would have hoped.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, millions of Brazilians woke up startled by a mysterious message from the country’s alert system. The alert level was classified as “extreme” and, worryingly, is believed to have been the work of hackers rather than an official body.
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 said “misantropi4.” That is an approximation of the Portuguese word “misanthropy” (with the final A changed to a 4). Like the English word “misanthropy”, it means hatred or distrust of humanity.
The message was accompanied by a loud alarm sound normally reserved for especially severe storms. Since the text message was sent shortly after midnight local time, it ensured that many people woke up in the middle of the night.
Brazilian authorities said the emergency messaging system was taken offline after a likely hacker attack, suggesting it was more than just a text sent in error by the government. In fact, there was no event or natural disaster serious enough to warrant activating the alert at that time, further pointing to bad actors as those responsible.
A potentially devastating attack
The fact that hackers were able to breach a government system that has the potential to communicate with every mobile device in a given area of the country has troubling implications, both for the ways in which civilians could be manipulated and for the security of government institutions as a whole.
One is more likely to trust a text from a known government source than one from an unknown number. With access to Brazil’s emergency broadcast system, hackers could send fraudulent messages that could have a larger impact than normal. That opens the door to all kinds of nefarious activities.
For now, this attack appears to have had a relatively minor impact. For many Brazilians posting on social media, the text was more confusing than anything else.
Last-Educator3947 on Reddit, for example, said: “I live in the city where the alert was first sent. It happened 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 match. I thought it was an incel Discord hacker sending a message to start a ‘The Purge’ style attack.” Then they added: “I’m laughing now, but I barely slept last night.”
Meanwhile, Reddit user Magnon summed up the situation by saying that “it sounds like an anime villain just showed up.”
According to the international Cyber Digest newsletter on X, this breach could be related to a previous attack on a Brazilian government employee who was infected with an information thief. International Cyber Digest claims that the stolen credentials included government logins, emails, development and staging environments, and more.
It is not yet known if this is what gave the hackers access to the Brazilian government’s alert system. Either way, it demonstrates the power hackers can amass if they find a way to access supposedly secure government systems. While this alert saga turned out to be relatively harmless, that may not be the case next time.
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