In today's exploration of cyber security tech news.
Yet another leak coming from Anonymous - this time we have over 800GB of files, emails,
databases and so on, stolen from the Roskomnadzor.
Now, the Roskomnadzor might sound a like a star wars villain but it's actually a Russian
government agency which has been thrown into the spotlight ever since the invasion of Ukraine.
But what is the Roskomnadzor, what do they do?
We'll get to that, but fyi - I'm doing a giveaway for recently passing 300 thousand subscribers
- which in of itself is just madness.
But for more on that, make sure to stick around right till the end of the video.
Anyhow, the Roskomnadzor, so the official Russian government website describes it as
the "Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media" - this
is a fancy way of describing what is effectively Russia's state censor, their ministry of truth.
These guys are tasked with patrolling both traditional media and social media for wrongthink.
Express a viewpoint that Putin doesn't like, and these guys will be on your case.
For example, they recently ordered Russian media to delete stories referring to what's
going in Ukraine as an "Assault", "Invasion", or "Declaration of war".
They're also responsible for in the last few days blocking Facebook and Twitter - and don't
get me wrong, I'm not particularly fond of Twitter or Facebook - but that's irrelevant
- the point is the Roskomnadzor is an enemy of freedom of speech and freedom of the press,
and so it's no wonder that they've become a juicy target for hacktivists.
Now, the 800GB dump appeared on DDoS -that's distributed denial of secrets a couple of
days ago, this website is like a repository for various data leaks.
If you had exfiltrated a few Russian government databases and want to get that data out to
the world, these are the guys you'd contact.
You know they're the real deal because they even have a fancy Latin motto.
And now added to their vast array of over 200 leaks is that of the Roskomnadzor.
As for the leak itself, it's said to specifically relate to the Roskomnadzor in Bashkortostan
- a region within Russia.
Now whenever there's a leak like this people of course will question its authenticity,
so I meandered through the dump myself and stumbled across an interesting little folder
containing pictures from all Roskomnadzor's office parties going back a good few years,
one of which took place the very day before the invasion of Ukraine itself on February
23rd - doesn't look like much of a party.
But in one of the photos you can clearly see the flag of the Roskomnadzor, as well as the
Russian flag, and the flag of "Bashkortostan" - the region of Russia this photo is apparently
from.
I'm censoring the faces by the way because I just don't want any hassle from YouTube
if someone in the pictures isn't too happy and decides to make a fuss.
Also in this leak are little comedy video skits made by Roskomnadzor employees, if the
context of them was different I might even call them wholesome - but I'm not playing
them here as they're full of copyrighted music and people jumping around so it's hard to
blur out faces, but I've got some clips of them over on my instagram story if you're
curious.
But anyway, the leak does look legit and fairly recent - this isn't just some old backup that's
been pwned.
But is there anything of importance in this leak?
Well, sadly I can't read Russian, so I'm relying on others to figure that one out.
As it stands there's no smoking gun, as in we haven't learnt of any top secret operation
from this dump.
However, it is a big leak, the 800GB equates to roughly 400,000 files, mostly PDFs and
emails, so it'll take a while for people to make their way through it.
But it could very well be that the leak is largely inconsequential, as in, we already
know about the insane censorship laws that Russians are subject to - the dump might just
be largely reiterating what we already know, along with random photos from office parties
sprinkled in.
As for the source of this data dump, all we know is it came from Anonymous.
Now, I realise whenever I mention Anonymous here on this channel there's always a bunch
of people in the comments asserting that "Anonymous" is just a front for the CIA.
Generally I disregard these people because the Anonymous hack in question is usually
just some low level website defacement which I doubt the NSA or whoever - has time for.
However in this case, those people may have more of a point.
You see, this leak wasn't announced with some flashy press release, or by a hacktivist group
trying to gain some traction by announcing it on twitter - the dump was silently handed
to DDoS for them to distribute.
Now if I was the NSA or some other 3 letter organisation and wanted to disseminate some
hacked data quickly, without putting any spotlight on the source, this is how I'd do it.
But of course it could just be the work of a hacktivist who would rather stay in the
shadows.
DDoS' press release says they're publishing this dump "in anticipation of Russia potentially
being cut off from the global internet on March 11".
Now, there's some misinformation going around about this that I feel we need to clear up
real quick, you may have seen articles saying Russians are "to be disconnected from the
global internet from Friday".
If you needed another reason not to get your tech news from the Metro, this is is, because
Friday has come and gone, and Russia's internet is still working.
It turns out this whole news story was based off a mistranslation of a Russian government
memo, in reality Russia is just telling it's state organisations to move their hosting
to within Russia, not a big deal, and no reason for panic.
If you're curious as to why Russia, disconnecting themselves from the internet would be such
a catastrophe see my previous video.
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Now, thanks to you guys I recently passed 300 thousand subscribers, which is insanity
- and so it's only fair we do a giveaway.
We're giving away 1 of every product my company Maltronics sells - so that's our BadUSB - the
MalDuino, our Wireless BadUSB - the MalDuino W, and a WiFi Deauther.
We're out of stock of deauth detectors so those aren't included, but I will throw in
a bunch of Maltronics stickers to make up for it.
But anyway, there are two ways to enter.
Firstly comment on this video, and secondly, follow me on instagram and comment on my latest
post, link for that is in the description.
You don't have to enter both, but of course if you do, you double your chances - as there
will be two winners, one from the youtube comments and one from the instagram comments.
48 hours after this video goes live I'll use random comment pickers and post the results
to my instagram story.
The giveaway is of course worldwide.
Anyhow, good luck, and thanks for watching.
I'll see you in the next video, have a good one.