For a long time, Russia and its high-level hackers have been a scarecrow in cyberspace. But after three months of war in Ukraine and facing cyberattacks and data leaks on an unprecedented scale, Russia has gone from being an attacker to being attacked.
The Russian authorities recognize this themselves. In an astonishing mirror effect for a country often accused of the same evils, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced these attacks in mid-April in a statement that went relatively unnoticed. In this statement, Russia denounces “the increasing number of pirate attacks against Russia” and the “attempts to disrupt critical infrastructure in our country”. “Hundreds of thousands of sabotages are carried out every week from abroad, mainly North America, the European Union and Ukraine. Personal data leaks have become common”deplores the ministry.
“The number of Russian attacks on Ukraine before the invasion pales in comparison to the cyberattacks launched in response by the international hacktivist community,” confirms DarkOwl companya specialist in cybersecurity, which closely studies the effects of warfare in cyberspace.
Numerous data leaks
Data leaks concerning Russia have multiplied, from the administration of Blagoveshchensk, a city in Siberia bordering China, to certain internal files of Roskomnadzor, the federal service for supervising communications and the media, which organizes the censorship of Internet in Russia, via ministries or the Russian public nuclear company Rosatom.
The DDoSecrets organization has become one of the main receptacles of this deluge of documents. In all, it’s more than 8 terabytes of data from Russian organizations that have been collected by this American platform specializing in the publication of large amounts of data from leaks.
“Russia has never been so targeted before. In many places it was considered a no-go zone. In others, going after Russian targets would have exposed you to retaliation,” decrypts Emma Best, the head of DDoSecrets, on his Twitter account. Now, according to her, more and more hacktivists are “willing to take these risks”believing that “Putin has put a target on Russian interests, and they are all under attack at the same time. (…) Frankly, we have never seen so much data coming out of Russia”.
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