In Russia, companies lost access to the Rosstat website following a hacker attack

Russian statistics have become unavailable following a massive cyberattack on Rosstat. The agency’s website has been down for several days, and Russian companies are complaining that they are unable to submit mandatory reports.

Rosstat attributes the lack of access to technical maintenance and recommends that users look for up-to-date information on the agency’s official social media accounts.

This message appeared on the agency’s website on November 4 in place of the statistical data. Meanwhile, the service detector404.ru had already recorded issues with accessing the site as early as November 3.

Between October 29 and November 1, Rosstat’s website suffered a massive cyberattack. On November 1, the agency promised to restore access to the site for users in the near future, but as of November 4, this had not happened.

Rosstat insists that the attack did not result in any system compromise or data leaks. At the same time, the hackers claimed to have stolen 23 TB of information. According to them, the materials they obtained include data on Russian losses in the war against Ukraine, demographic and economic statistics, as well as documents marked “for official use only.”

After the hack, a message in Belarusian was left on the Rosstat website: “No one will escape accountability.”

The consequences of the cyberattack affected more than just access to statistical information. Because the website is down, companies are unable to submit reports to Rosstat.

“We’re waiting—it’s impossible to work. Reports are piling up,” complained one user on the agency’s page on the social network VKontakte.

In response, Rosstat extended the deadline for submitting primary statistical data to November 13.

As a reminder, the Belarusian hacker group “Cyberpartisans,” in collaboration with the Silent Crow group, reported that they had infiltrated the internal IT infrastructure of the Federal State Statistics Service of Russia (Rosstat).

The hacker group Black8Mirror announced the publication of an archive belonging to Russian official Mikhail Babich, which allegedly contains his correspondence with Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. The messages released by the hackers discuss Putin, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Alexei Navalny. 

Hackers breached the website of Radio PiK in Bydgoszcz and published a false article about Poland’s alleged plans to seize part of the Czech Republic’s territory.