Hackers built a site that lets anyone text random Russians about the war in Ukraine

• A Polish hacktivist group created a tool allowing people to send messages to random Russians.
• A spokesperson told Insider the tool has been used to send nearly 30 million messages.

For almost two weeks, people have been using a website set up by a hacking collective to message randomly selected Russian people about their government's invasion of Ukraine.

The service's purpose, its website states, is to cut through Russian President Vladimir Putin's media censorship and government propaganda to reach average citizens. The Kremlin has extensively controlled information about the war, forcing independent news outlets to shutter, restricting social media access and implementing a law banning any information that the government states is "false."

The website's creators are a Polish hactivist group called Squad303, who are connected to the larger Anonymous hacking collective and launched the tool on March 6. The tool has received increasing media attention and been used to send over 30 million messages so far, a spokesperson for the group claimed to Insider. (Insider could not independently verify that number.)

"We started as a group of friends and cyber security and communication experts from Poland," the spokesperson said. "When the war broke out it was obvious that we would support the Ukrainians. Each of us now has refugees from Ukraine at home." They said their group has nearly 100 members now.

The website is fairly straightforward to use, and doesn't require knowledge of Russian to send the preset messages. Users are given a random Whatsapp number, which they can refresh as many times as they want, and a variety of Russian-language texts that they can send them. Clicking a button on the site opens Whatsapp in another tab, where users can send the text.

The preset texts often begin with pleasantries and usually end with a question about how the person at the receiving end is doing amid the invasion.

The program works using a bank of nearly 140 million Russian email addresses and 20 million cell phone numbers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which also interviewed the group. The spokesperson claimed to Insider they obtained this personal information by hacking a "Russian database."

The group tweeted on Tuesday claiming the Russian government had started blocking prewritten messages sent from their website, although they said they found a workaround by uploading new messages.

The spokesperson said they knew the messages were being blocked because the messages they sent to Russian numbers would come through as "#####" on Russian phones, while other statements, like "I love Coca-Cola," appeared as normal.

The group has also claimed in multiple tweets that the website has been hit with Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which involve someone trying to shut down an internet service or website by overwhelming it with traffic. Squad303 recently created a Discord channel dedicated to the website, in which people can congregate and share templates about what to message after the initial text once they have someone on the line.