Russia’s Secret Intelligence Agency Hacked: ‘Largest Data Breach In Its History’

Red faces in Moscow this weekend, with the news that hackers have successfully targetedFSB—Russia’s Federal Security Service. The hackers managed to steal 7.5 terabytes of data from a major contractor, exposing secret FSB projects to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape social media, and help the state split its internet off from the rest of the world. The data was passed to mainstream media outlets for publishing.

Digital Revolution has targeted FSB before. It is unknown how tightly the two hacking groups are linked. As well as defacing SyTech

’s homepage with the Yoba Face, 0v1ru$also detailed the project names exposed: ‘Arion’, ‘Relation’, ‘Hryvnia,’ alongside the names of the SyTech project managers. The BBC report claims that no actual state secrets were exposed. The projects themselves appear to be a mix of social media scraping (Nautilus), targeted collection against internet users seeking to anonymize their activities (Nautilus-S), data collection targeting Russian enterprises (Mentor), and projects that seem to relate to Russia’s ongoing initiative to build an option to separate the internal internet from the world wide web (Hope and Tax-3).The BBC claims that SyTech’s projects were mostly contracted withMilitary Unit 71330, part of FSB’s 16th Directorate which handles signals intelligence, the samegroup accused of emailing spyware to Ukranian intelligence officers in 2015.

Source: forbes.com