Mobile phone users from at least seven states, plus the Federal District, received the false messages sent after the hacking of the Civil Defense national disaster notification systembetween the night of this Friday (19) and the early hours of this Saturday (20). According to the ministry, the shots were fired between 11:41 pm and 1:23 am.
As Agência Brasil found, a preliminary analysis indicates that the different alerts reached residents of:
- Belo Horizonte (MG),
- Brasilia (DF),
- Campo Grande (MS),
- Curitiba (PR),
- Rio Branco (AC),
- Rio de Janeiro (RJ),
- Salvador (BA) and
- São Paulo (SP).
Added together, these cities bring together around 30 million people. In addition to the capitals, alerts were also sent to other smaller municipalities in the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Mato Grosso do Sul.
In a press conference this Saturday morning, the national secretary of Protection and Civil Defense of the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development, Wolnei Wolff, clarified that, .
“There were nine messages issued by Cell Broadcast [sistema implantado em 2025] and one via the SMS system [sistema utilizado desde 2014 e substituído no ano passado],” stated Wolff.
O Cell Broadcast It is the technology that directly accesses the cell phones of the population in risk areas. The technology allows alerts to arrive quickly and efficiently, without the need for an app or prior registration.
According to the national secretary, the first alert was triggered for Curitiba. Shortly afterwards, mobile phone users in other locations began to receive the messages. In addition to the sound alert, the messages contained text that mentioned “alien invasion”, among others.
According to the secretary, work with the Civil Defense technical team will determine whether the messages were sent by a person or an articulated group. .
A suspicion is that the invasion took place on the national Civil Defense platform itselfresponsible for issuing alerts.
In a note, Anatel reported that, as far as is known so far, “the alerts in question did not go through the official channels of the system’s technical platform, operated by ABR Telecom (Associação Brasileira de Recursos em Telecommunications)”.
