Russia’s media censorship agency has been hacked and releases 364,000 Files

By Mehr Ali / in Science & Tech / on Saturday, 12 Mar 2022 


Anonymous has breached the database of Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling, and censoring Russian media.

The cyberattack allowed the hacktivist group to seize more than 360,000 files, which have now been released to the public.

The 820GB data dump focuses primarily on documents concerning the republic of Bashkortostan, one of the largest provinces in the Russian federation.

According to Anonymous, Roskomnadzor’s activities are a matter of public interest ‘to the people of Russia and to the world’.

“Their recent actions have only emphasized this,” Anonymous said in a statement.

“Roskomnadzor has given instructions about what can be said and ordered media outlets to delete stories that call Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an invasion.

“In response to Facebook’s fact-checking Russia’s statements about the war, Roskomnadzor began restricting access to Facebook before later blocking it.

“Roskomnadzor also threatened to block access to Russian Wikipedia over their article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“This follows an established history of similar actions in the past.”

According to Distributed Email of Secrets, their source from Anonymous felt ‘the Russian people should have access to information about their government’ after being cut off from independent media and news outlets from the outside world.

“We are publishing this release in anticipation of Russia potentially being cut off from the global internet on March 11, and hope Russians will have time to download this data, before then,” the statement issued from Distributed Email of Secrets said.