Transneft, a Russian pipeline company, recently suffered a massive data leak from an unidentified hacktivist group.
Transneft is one of Russia’s most prominent state-controlled oil pipeline organizations. Last week, a leak hosting site known as Distributed Denial of Secrets revealed a link to the 79 gigabytes worth of emails from the Omega Company – the pipeline firm’s research and development division.
Since Russia has initiated an invasion against Ukraine, the earlier mentioned pipeline company received a sanction that resulted in the blockage of investments from the United States market.
The email leaks of Transneft seem to be from its R&D unit.
According to researchers, Transneft’s email leaks contain the contents of several email accounts of its employees. The leak also included email messages and file attachments containing product shipment details and invoices, which portrayed images of file server racks and equipment configurations.
Another researcher revealed that the hacktivists timestamped the leaked email last March 15. The publisher of the leak noted that the attack was dedicated to Hilary Clinton since she was the one who encouraged the hacktivists groups to attack Russian cyberspace.
Some experts believe that the Ukrainian government had urged hacktivists to aid them with the current situation. However, it is scarce for a high-profiled persona to adopt Ukraine’s strategy in counteracting Russia’s movements.
The data leaks conducted by the hacktivist groups worldwide have inflicted less impact and have not changed the course of this current geopolitical despite. Still, experts believe that these diminutive cyberattacks will affect Russia in the long run.
The Russian military forces are currently attacking the Ukrainian territory with their functional brute-force capability. The Ukraine-based hackers trying to fight back cannot fully deploy their counterattacks since they are bombarded with numerous firearms.
As Russia and Ukraine’s political dispute continues its third week, researchers expect that there will be more incidents of cyber warfare in the coming months.
