Hackers Breach Russia’s National Intelligence Service

It has been confirmed that a contractor of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has been hacked by some hacker group. Hackers effectively focused on Russia’s state security agency a week ago through their contractor that has stolen and publishing subtleties of confidential projects that include social media scraping and Tor de-anonymization.

This hacking has happened last week i.e on July 13th, when a hackers group named 0v1ru$ hacked SyTech’s Active Directory server from where they accessed the organization’s whole IT network infrastructure which also included JIRA instance. This hacking has stolen about 7.5TB of information from the network of contractor, and they destroyed the organization’s site with a “yoba face” an emoticon which is an emoji well known with Russian users that means “trolling”.

The screenshot of organization’s servers was posted on Twitter by the hackers and then they imparted the stolen information to Digital Revolution which is another hacking group who a year ago hacked Quantum which is another FSB contractor. Digital Revolution then shared this data to Russian media.

According to BBC Russia, the hacked data incorporates data about various non-public undertakings that were being created by Sytech in the interest of the Russian government and its intelligence agency. In order to confirm the hacking, the hacker group 0v1ru$ posted pictures of inner pages of Sytech’s site and of server drives as well as the users in their Windows domain controller.

According to BBC Russia, it has been analyzed that there were a number of projects that were being developed by Sytech and it includes:

Mentor – This was being produced for the Russian military unit No. 71330, which is the radio- electronic intelligence of the FSB of Russia. This undertaking could help to monitor chosen email accounts at determined interims so as to gather data identified with specific phrases.

Nautilus – This project could help to gather data about clients on interpersonal organizations like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

Nautilus-S – This could help to de-anonymizing users on Tor network by developing exit nodes with the help of Russian government.

Reward – This project was being intended to infiltrate and perform covert activities on distributed network systems. This incorporates BitTorrent, Jabber, OpenFT, and ED2K.

Tax – 3 – It is the latest venture and was authorized by “Chief Scientific Innovation Center JSC, that reports to the Federal Tax Service”. This undertaking would give the capacity to physically expel data from the Federal Tax Service about individuals under state security.

After hacking, Sytech site has been shut down and do not respond to any inquiry. This has been confirmed by BBC that this breach is the largest one in the history of Russian special service as it has stolen a large measure of data.

Author: Shikha Arora

Technical Writer, Shikha has 5+ years of experience in the area of Technical Writing.