The hackers, belonging to a group known as 0v1ru$, stole 7.5TB of data from SyTech, a contractor for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
The stolen information was shared with another hacking group and journalists. The group replaced the SyTech homepage with a large picture of ‘Comfy Guy’, also known as YOBA, a trolling icon popular among Russian internet users. For the time being, SyTech has hidden its website.
Approximately 20 secret projects were revealed by the hackers, mostly commissioned by a military service connected to the FSB. These included projects to collect information about social media users (Nautilus), to search email servers belonging to large companies (Mentor), to find vulnerabilities in the peer-to-peer BitTorrent system used to share media, and to disconnect from the wider internet if threatened, such that all traffic is contained within Russia’s borders (Hope).
BBC Russia commented that this could be “the largest data leak...