Russian security agencies shut down parts of a special monitoring system designed to protect President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides, in an unprecedented precautionary measure taken in the aftermath of the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran.
Two informed sources told the Financial Times that the protection system — which differs in function from the public camera network monitoring Moscow — underwent a thorough inspection by engineers and was not reactivated until after strict technical steps were taken to completely isolate it from the internet. This aimed to avoid the vulnerabilities that were exploited to hack Iranian surveillance systems.
The newspaper reported that the Russian decision came after the Iranian experience proved that traditional surveillance infrastructure had turned into a tool in the hands of enemies. Israeli intelligence managed to collect vast amounts of footage from traffic cameras in Iran and used artificial intelligence techniques to analyze it, pinpointing the exact location and timing of a meeting held on February 28 between Khamenei and his closest aides. That meeting ended with the killing of several senior security officials during the first American-Israeli strike on Iran.
The director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, sounded the alarm on this matter, warning regional security chiefs that surveillance tools have become an existential threat, noting that software "backdoors" in Tehran's monitoring systems were the key to targeting the victims.
This security panic stems from a technological leap that has enabled intelligence agencies to search within millions of hours of video using simple "natural language" queries, such as searching for "a person who changed clothes multiple times" or "a vehicle that passed the same location several times."
These capabilities allow scanning vast cities and extracting behavioral patterns and sensitive secrets on a scale previously unattainable.
While nations race to enhance these technologies, the security challenge remains. Recent conflicts have shown that the most advanced systems can sometimes fail against "low-tech measures." The newspaper cited the example of attempts to track Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who managed to evade intense technical pursuit for months by relying on traditional and disguised communication methods, before being killed in a chance encounter in October 2024.
source: Financial Times