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- Hackers have shared data concerning Russian casualties in its war with Ukraine on a Russian state website, while also stealing 23TB of data
- Russian state statistics agency Rosstat admitted its servers were targeted over the Halloween weekend
- The organization’s electronic document management system was also hacked and exfiltrated
Russian casualty figures in its war with Ukraine have been kept under wraps since 2024, but have now been displayed on the website of Russian state statistics agency Rosstat following a major breach of security.
Rosstat admitted to a breach over the weekend of October 29 to November 1, 2026, but has yet to admit to any form of exfiltration - despite hacker groups Belarusian CyberPartisans and Silent Crow confirming around 23TB of data was taken.
As well as the casualty figures, the Silent Crow group and its collaborators have boasted of hacking and stealing a document management system, and also claimed to have taken control of vehicles.
Specialized units
The details of what is being considered a successful hack by its perpetrators were published on Telegram. The Silent Crow account explained that “access was gained to a large part of the IT infrastructure of the department, including the central office, regional units and the Main Interregional Center for the Processing and Dissemination of Statistical Information.”
Rosstat reported that its information resources were targeted over the Halloween weekend, says Kommersant (translated from Russian). “The infrastructure worked normally: monitoring systems in a timely manner alerted about suspicious activity, which allowed to quickly start the response.”
The organization’s confirmation added: “Compromising databases and leakage of information protected by law has not been identified.”
Cybersecurity experts, on-site experts, and “specialized units in the field of information security and law enforcement agencies are establishing the vector of the attack and identify the sources of the threat,” the department added.
During its prolonged access to Rosstat's servers, the Cyberguerillas BY and Silent Crow groups revealed human casualties to Russian military personnel since the beginning of the war in Ukraine as 1,584,910.
It also revealed a loss of 587,409 UAVs, demonstrating that this is a classification of combat asset that is in far greater use than tanks, artillery, and manned aircraft.
In supporting its claim of stealing 23TB of data across electronic document management and other databases, the group stated (translated) “The scale of the incident goes far beyond the compromise of individual servers or user accounts. After all, it is about penetration into the infrastructure of the federal department with access to central and regional systems, internal circuits and data sets of public and official value.”
Access to domain controllers of Rosstat unlocked access to the organization’s main data, eventually allowing the hackers to compromise virtualization systems like VMware ESXi, along with infrastructure management systems.
The casualty figures are not likely to be verified by official sources in Russia.
