Global cyber squad’s hack attacks on the Kremlin

For years he was at the very top of the FBI’S most-wanted list with the Russian governmentbacked hacker Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin suspected of cyber attacks on Germany’s parliament and the 2016 Rio Olympics.

A few weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, Badin’s own personal information, including his email, Facebook accounts and passwords, mobile phone number and passport details, were leaked online.

Another target of an international coalition of pro-ukrainian hackers has been the All-russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, known as the voice of the Kremlin. Almost a million emails spanning 20 years of the broadcaster’s history were published on the internet on March 30.

These incidents are part of a massive cyber assault on Russian companies and government bodies by pro-ukrainian hackers, many previously unknown to security experts.

Hundreds of millions of documents have been leaked from firms as varied as Transneft, a pipeline operator close to the Russian government; Belarusian power supplier Elektrotsentrmontazh and an arm of the Russian Orthodox Church that backed the war.

One hack by a Belarusian dissident group, the Cyber Partisans, targeted the automatic signalling system and the ticketing system to slow down freight trains carrying Russian weapons to northern Ukraine. Western intelligence credits the disruption with bogging down Russian forces en route to Kyiv.

Describing the breadth of leaks as breathtaking, Juan Andres GuerreroSaade, principal threat researcher at cyber security group Sentinelone, told the Financial Times: “Russia is being hacked at an unprecedented scale by a lower tier of attacker and there are tens of terabytes of data that’s just falling out of the sky.”