In today's exploration of cyber security tech news: You might recognise this, the logo of
Russia's most watched news channel.
Whenever we see clips of Russian TV they pretty much always come from this one channel.
And a few days ago, the company behind this channel, Russia's largest TV Network was hacked.
Almost 800GB of data was stolen and leaked online.
This includes 4 thousand files and 900 thousand emails, some of which go back as far as 20
years.
And now it's all downloadable through torrents.
I have of course explored this leak so you don't have to, and there is some pretty interesting
stuff in here, for example, it seems like this Russian TV network, a 500 million dollar
company is quite fond of using pirated software.
So, this TV network is called VGTRK - and if you're wondering where that clunky name
comes from, the company's official name is actually "The All-Russia State Television
and Radio Broadcasting Company", but in Cyrillic it's initials are pronounced VGTRK.
So, VGTRK, it's Russia's largest media corporation, and throughout the war in Ukraine it's been
instrumental in broadcasting propaganda to the Russian people, in fact, the "Russian
government has declared VGTRK essential for the "security of the state.""
- and you won't be surprised to hear this corporation is owned by the government, it's
almost as if the Kremlin has been trying to make them a target for hacktivisits.
And just a few days ago, the inevitable happened, when hacktivist group NB65, standing for for
"Network Battalion 65" decided to make VGTRK a target.
But who is NB65 - so, this group only popped up in February this year, after the invasion
of Ukraine had kicked off, but in the short time since then, they've managed to gain hundreds
of thousands of followers on twitter - mostly through the drama surrounding them claiming
to have hacked Kaspersky and announcing they were going to leak Kaspersky's actual source
code.
They generated a whole bunch of hype for this leak - mainly because Kaspersky is a Russian
company which makes anti malware products, and there's a lot of controversy surrounding
Kaspersky, as they're "Alleged [to have colluded with] Russian intelligence" and there's rumours
about their products being used for spying.
In fact the FCC has even declared them a national security threat, and Germany has warned against
using their products.
So, as you can imagine, the prospect of their source code being leaked, excited security
researchers quite a bit.
That is, until NB65 released the "source code" , and it was found to have "nothing to do
with sensitive or confidential data or source code.", and that in reality, "the data released
has no value".
People figured that NB65 did this "purely to gain attention", and no doubt they lost
a bunch of reputation.
So, when they tweeted that they had hacked VGTRK, people were... sceptical.
But they did deliver, and the 786.2GB dump is now available through distributed denial
of secrets.
It's split into two downloads, the leaked emails and the leaked files.
I've focused on trawling through those files, and there's a real mix of things in here,
let's have a look.
There's a bunch of promotional material relating to random Russian TV shows.
There's also a load of military footage, but it seems to be from 2014 rather than the current
conflict.
There is some footage of missile tests, but judging from the aspect ratio alone, these
don't look all too recent.
There's some really random stuff in this leak, like images of a CGI bathroom, from multiple
angles of course.
In addition we've got 5 minutes of b-roll of a blown over bus shelter, followed by a
guy explaining that the bus shelter was probably blown over by the wind and then we're treated
to a close up of his calculations.
In my exploration of the files I came across a bunch of exe's suspiciously titled keygen
or keymaker...
I of course ran them out of curiosity, and yep, if this leak is to be believed then it
looks like Russia's largest media company relies on using pirated software.
I can't say expected to make that revelation, especially for a company with revenue in excess
of half a billion dollars.
But good news for VGTRK, as it looks like software piracy in Russia is actually set
be become legalised.
The reasoning is that because foreign companies have been refusing to sell software to Russian
customers, the Russian government will just allow piracy so people can get their software
anyway.
Also in the dump, I came across exactly 64 images of some guy posing in front of a green
screen.
I had no idea who this was until I asked you guys on instagram - shoot me a cheeky follow
by the way - turns out this is one of Russia's foremost propagandists, one "Vladimir Solovyov",
he's an anchor on Russia-1, the main tv channel run by VGTRK.
Now, if this guy is well known in Russia, I can imagine these photos are very memeable,
so if you want 'em, you can find them in the jpg folder within the dump.
Moving on, the dump contains a bunch of documents, I found ratings for all of VGTRK's TV shows
going back 20 years, but for the most part these documents, of which there are quite
a lot, make absolutely no sense at all to me, because well - I can't read Russian.
I haven't come across any other deep dives into this leak that I can link you, for the
most part unless there's something truly groundbreaking in a data leak, you'll probably never hear
about the contents of the leak in the media.
And after this leak went live, NB65, vowed to continue their leaking escapades - and
in recent days they've changed tactics slightly.
They're now holding Russian companies to ransom, with - well, ransomware, pledging that any
ransom "payment[s] will be donated to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine".
And interestingly researchers discovered that their ransomware uses leaked Conti source
code.
Conti being a Russian cybercrime gang which pledged allegiance to Putin about a month
ago, before reneging on that pledge of allegiance after they realised pissing that off their
Ukrainian members was probably a bad idea - which it was, because in retaliation a Ukrainian
insider used an anonymous twitter account to leak a bunch of top secret Conti files,
including the source code that NB65 have gone on to use.
now, in the last few weeks leak sites have been publishing Russian data dumps almost
daily from various hacked companies, do let me know in the comments if there's any particular
leak you want me to have a close look at.
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