Russia Hit With 'Unprecedented' Breaches By Pro-Ukrainian Cyberattackers

This week the Washington Post described Russia as "struggling under an unprecedented hacking wave" — with one survey finding Russia is now the world's leader for leaked sensitive data (such as passwords and email addresses). "Federation government: your lack of honor and blatant war crimes have earned you a special prize..." read a message left behind on one of the breached networks...

20 years of email from one of Russia's government-owned TV/radio broadcasting companies were stolen. The names of hundreds of Russia's own FSB security agents have been distributed by the Ukrainian government through its IT Army channel on telegram. The Post says that criminals with no ideological stake in the conflict have also gotten in on the act, taking advantage of security teams to grab money as the aura of invincibility falls. The pledge backfired because it had affiliates in Ukraine. One of them made it easier for security software to detect and block attacks by posting more than 100,000 internal gang chats and the source code for its core program. As the war began to look inevitable, Network Battalion 65 went further. We decided to give Russia a taste of its own medicine by modifying the leaked version of the Conti code to evade the new detections, improved the encryption and then used it to lock up files inside government-connected Russian companies. The group said that Conti caused a lot of pain and heartache for companies around the world. The group has not gotten any money yet, but will give anything it collects to Ukraine.

Ars Technica quotes a cybersecurity researcher who now says "there are tens of terabytes of data that's just falling out of the sky."

SpzToid shared the article on Slashdot.