Hackers steal 7.5TB of data from business contacts Russian intelligence
A contractor of the Russian intelligence service FSB has been hacked. At the company Sytech, 7.5TB of documents have been stolen and the website has been defaced. The files describe projects for, among other things, social media scraping and decryption of Tor traffic.
The hack was carried out on July 13 by the group 0v1ru$, which looted the 7.5TB and passed it on to hacker group Digital Revolution, who in turn passed it on to various media. The two groups also walk with the hack for sale on Twitter. The data has been passed on to the Russian branch of the BBC, among others.
Several projects are described in the documents. Nautilus is for scraping data from social media users, Nautilus-S is for de-anonymizing Tor traffic, Reward is for penetrating peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent, Mentor is for email tapping and searching, Hope is an investigation into the connections of the Russian Internet with that of other countries and Tax-3 is the project to set up an intranet where the information of important, sensitive figures such as politicians would be stored.
The plans are not entirely new. Earlier this year, for example, Russian President Putin signed a bill for a “sovereign Russian internet” and the Russian BBC notes that the phenomenon of “rogue Tor exit nodes” has already been described in a 2014 investigative report. managed to get hold of the files. Contractors associated with a target are more often seen as susceptible to hacking.
The Sytech website is currently offline and affected parties could not be reached for media requests for comment with the documents in hand.