The infamous Russian shortwave radio UVB-76 (aka “The Buzzer”) numbers station, which has long been theorized to be a communications system for the Russian military/government was hacked this week. The station typically plays a series of buzzing tones occasionally followed by brief voice transmissions, a pattern which is extremely rare to deviate.

Hackers first gained access to the station on the 17th, broadcasting songs such as the long-outdated memetic K-Pop song “Gangnam Style” and sending images and text through the spectrogram view of the channel. The messages on the spectrogram varied, and contained phrases such as “world peace” as well as a variety of insults in both Russian and Ukrainian.

The exact identity and motive of the hackers is unknown, but a Telegram username (owned by a man identifying himself as Aleksander Panfilov) was eventually sent over the spectrogram, where he took requests for messages and songs to be played over the station. Many suspect that the hack corresponds with Russia’s threats of invasion of #Ukraine, and that it may be the work of so called “hacktivists” who sought to disrupt Russian communications in protest of these threats.