Hackers Target Russia’s Secret Intelligence Agency

Hackers have breached SyTech, a contractor for FSB, Russia’s national intelligence service, from where they stole information about internal projects the company was working on behalf of the agency, ZDNet reports.

The breach took place last weekend, on July 13, when a group of hackers going by the name of 0v1ru$ hacked into SyTech’s Active Directory server from where they gained access to the company’s entire IT network, including a JIRA instance.

Hackers stole 7.5TB of data from the contractor’s network, and they defaced the company’s website with a “yoba face,” an emoji popular with Russian users that stands for “trolling.”

Hackers posted screenshots of the company’s servers on Twitter and later shared the stolen data with Digital Revolution, another hacking group who last year breached Quantum, another FSB contractor, ZDNet adds.

This second hacker group shared the stolen files in greater detail on their Twitter account, on Thursday, July 18, and with Russian journalists afterward.

BBC Russia, who received the full trove of documents, claims there were other older projects for researching other network protocols such as Jabber (instant messaging), ED2K (eDonkey), and OpenFT (enterprise file transfer).

Other files posted on the Digital Revolution Twitter account claimed that the FSB was also tracking students and pensioners.