Russian Hackers Take Aim at Kremlin Targets: Report

Russian threat actors have begun launching cyber-attacks at targets inside their country, in retaliation for what they see as a needless war with Ukraine, according to a new report.

The Kyiv Post claimed to have spoken to members of the National Republican Army (NRA), a Russian hacking outfit working towards the overthrow of the Putin regime.

Their first target was Unisoftware, a Russian software developer that reportedly works closely with government clients.

The group claimed to have stolen all data held by the firm, including: banking and personal account credentials, employee information, phone numbers, addresses, contracts, and proprietary code for Unisoftware clients and software.

Among the trove was apparently data from several Russian clients. The paper confirmed the authenticity of this after reviewing materials shared by the NRA.

“It’s funny because they tried to kick us out and fix the machines,” an NRA member reportedly told the Kyiv Post. “They don’t understand that we are still there, and have been there for months, and will continue to terrorize them for helping maintain the Putin regime.”

The group also claimed to have compromised other clients, although details of these couldn’t be verified in the report.

However, one potential target could have been Russian IT retail giant DNS, which admitted in a brief statement earlier this week that it had been breached.

It revealed that although passwords and bank card data was safe, an unspecified volume of personal information on customers and employees had been compromised.

“We see that the attack was carried out by a group of hackers. Hacking was carried out from servers located outside the Russian Federation,” it said.

“We have already found gaps in the protection of our information infrastructure and are working to strengthen information security in the company.”

Cyber-attacks have been a key tactic for both Ukraine and Russia over recent months. Ukraine reached out to the global community to help it create an “IT army” to DDoS key Russian sites, while Russian state hackers have launched hundreds of separate destructive and information ops campaigns against Kyiv.