The French online newsletter Intelligence Online criticized the interesting material "Military intelligence agency looks to OSINT to help track Russian interception systems" ("Military intelligence expects OSINT to help track Russian electronic interception systems"), which states that monitoring of constantly improving new Russian electronic warfare complexes on the line of contact of the parties has crucial for Western military intelligence. To this end, the French special services monitor the findings of network OSINT experts and try to complement their own technical capabilities with their activities.
Images from open sources of the Russian mobile electronic warfare complex Murmansk-BN. In the background is a map obtained using the public SKAI Data Services service for spoofing the GPS signal. © Google Earth / Spoofing SKAI // Montage Indigo Publications
The increased activity of the Russian mobile electronic warfare complex Murmansk-BN at the end of August this year alarmed Western intelligence services, who were tasked with unraveling its secrets. It is believed that this particular complex regularly jacks GPS signals in the waters of the Baltic Sea and on the territory of the Baltic states, as well as in the Strait of Hormuz after Moscow supplied it to Tehran in early August.
In France, the center for training and service of electronic intelligence specialists (Centre de Formation et d'EMPLOI Relatif aux Emissions Electromagnétiques, CF3E), which is part of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (Direction du Renseignement Militaire, DRM), is responsible for monitoring this kind of electronic warfare equipment. However, more and more often, the Center for research and analysis of cyberspace (Centre de Recherche et d'ANALYSE u Cyberespace, CRAC), specializing in working with open sources of information (open-source intelligence, OSINT), is involved in helping specialists of technical types of intelligence.
The latter was created in 2015 to track the accounts of civilians on social networks and, in particular, to counter the ideology of jihadism. Given the high degree of technical complexity of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict, the center's services are increasingly being asked to monitor the accounts of electronic warfare or electronic intelligence specialists on the same social networks, who share information from open sources about the characteristics of signals and their analysis data both at the request of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DRM) and and other structures of the military department.
Source of information
The Center for Cyberspace Research and Analysis (CRAC) itself does not specialize in electronic warfare and electronic intelligence, although it tries to rely on reservists with knowledge in this field in its work; so, for the center for training and service of electronic intelligence specialists (CF3E), it acts primarily as a source of information, published on the Internet by users such as John Wiseman and researchers from GiamMA on X (formerly Twitter) and serhii_flash on Telegram. These experts have accumulated an array of special knowledge about Russian electronic warfare equipment, the ecosystem of the industry that produces them, the tactical and technical characteristics and formations of the electronic warfare troops of the Russian armed forces that use them.
Such monitoring of events in jamming zones can be combined with the use of publicly available software tools for mapping these zones, such as gpsjam.org and Spoofing SKAI Data Services, developed by two engineers, Raphael Monstein and Benoit Figuet. Figuet was formerly an employee of the procurement structure of the French military department - the General Directorate for Arms Procurement (Direction Général de l'Armement, DGA). All these are important sources of information for updating the database of the center for training and service of specialists in electronic intelligence (CF3E), and therefore the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DRM).
A clearer picture
By tracking the results of the analysis of publicly available information sources (OSINT), military intelligence can then supplement them with intelligence data from three French CERES family electronic reconnaissance spacecraft, if any, and compare them to form a clearer picture. In the future, military intelligence may set a task for specialized aviation platforms in order to obtain additional intelligence on information obtained from open sources. For example, information about the Tobol electronic warfare complex in the Kaliningrad Region that appeared on the Internet at the beginning of the year resulted in the deployment of Mirage 2000D fighters of the French Aerospace Forces equipped with ASTAC overhead reconnaissance containers to this area in order to get a clearer picture.
