Speaking onstage at Semafor’s World Economic Summit, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company is currently dealing with attempts by various types of Russian agents to “invade” online gambling communities, with a particular focus on those associated with it Minecraft.
While acknowledging that these attempts are pretty low on the priority list when it comes to corporate and national security, “it’s not like playing Call of Duty in the real world results in fatalities, that are video games” — Smith still emphasizes the importance of fighting the intruders undertaken to spread propaganda and misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Around games there is a community of gamers, they come together, they talk to each other even when they are playing a game. And over the past few months, our digital threat analysis team has identified efforts by Russians to basically penetrate some of these gaming communities,” he says.
“We’ve advised governments on this, it’s the Wagner group, it’s the Russian intelligence agency, and they only partially use this as a place to circulate information.” Smith then cites the specific case of Russian agents who a Minecraft Discord Channel.
As we reported, this Discord server is at the center of an international intelligence scandalafter classified US documents were released there as part of a leak described by the Pentagon as the “most damaging in decades”.
The Wagner Group is a Russian PMC (private military company) that has historically worked in such close proximity to the government that it is “is considered a de facto unit of the Ministry of Defense or the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.”
