Belarusian hackers behind attack on largest Russian airline

The Russian flag carrier Aeroflot has already cancelled 47 flights by this morning, including those to and from Minsk.

Belarusian hackers, known as the Cyber Partisans, were behind the incident. They claim that, together with hacktivists from Silent Crow, they compromised and destroyed the internal IT infrastructure of the Russian airline.

According to the hackers, they had been inside Aeroflot’s corporate network for a year. They downloaded the entire flight history, gained control over employees’ personal computers (including those of top management), copied data from wiretapping servers, and much more.

“As a result of our actions, around 7,000 servers — both physical and virtual — were destroyed. The volume of the obtained data amounts to 12TB of databases, 8TB of files from Windows Share, and 2TB of corporate emails,” the hacktivists claim. “All of these resources are now inaccessible or destroyed. Recovery may require tens of millions of dollars. The damage is strategic.”

Meanwhile, Aeroflot reported a “failure in the operation of information systems,” which has forced “adjustments to the flight schedule.”