Ukrainian hacktivists claim to have breached the Central Bank of Russia, stealing thousands of internal documents. A 2.6 GB folder released publicly on Thursday and partially reviewed by The Record contains 27,000 allegedly stolen files detailing the bank’s operations, its security policies, and the personal data of some of its current and former employees. “If Russia’s Central Bank cannot protect its own data, how can it guarantee the stability of the ruble?” hacktivists wrote on the Telegram messaging app. The alleged heist was carried out by members from Ukraine’s IT Army — a group of more than 200,000 cyber volunteers formed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February to conduct coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks on Russian websites. The central bank is one of Russia’s most important financial institutions, and serves as the architect of state monetary policy and regulator of the national currency. It denied that its system had been hacked and said that all leaked documents were already in the public domain, Russian media reported. This is not the first time that hackers have claimed to have breached the central bank. In March, hackers from the group Anonymous said they had leaked 35,000 documents from the bank and published them online. “For spies, media organizations, and human rights activists, it is a treasure trove with insights and stories that could have catastrophic consequences for Russia,” according to Kenneth Geers, an analyst at a data security startup Very Good Security.
via therecord: Ukrainian hacktivists claim to leak trove of documents from Russia’s central bank