Thousands of wealthy Moscow residents who subscribed to a regional internet provider have had personal data including names, home addresses and mobile numbers posted online. People affected by the high-profile data leak are all clients of Moscow-based internet provider Akado Telecom, a large telecommunications network owned by billionaire businessman Viktor Vekselberg, which said it had opened an inquiry into the incident.
Russian authorities have been paying close attention to such incidents following leaks that led to the publication of information about military intelligence agents accused of links to an attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain.
The episode was found a week ago and was found to have uncovered individual information including names, places of residence and versatile numbers, as per a Reuters report.
The information was transferred to the database of, RIPE NCC, a not-for-benefit territorial web library for Europe of which Akado Telecom is a piece of. Aleksei Semenyaka, a RIPE NCC correspondences chief, told the news organization Akado Telecom more likely than not transferred data and that the client points of interest could now be gotten to uninhibitedly.
“We generally react to feedback with consideration and appreciation and lead intensive examinations to reveal vulnerabilities in our data frameworks with the end goal to counteract conceivable information releases,” the firm said in an announcement.
Akado Telecom has since propelled an examination concerning the episode yet did not say whether it knew the private information of its customers had been distributed or whether the organization had given the data. The broadcast communications organize is possessed by very rich person representative Viktor Vekselberg.
Akado Telecom operates three subnetworks with 24,500 IP addresses in total. All of those individual users, most of whom live in the capital’s wealthiest districts, could have been affected. The database also listed information about banks and government agencies that use Akado Telecom, as well as their staff’s contact details. In Russia, it has been illegal to make personal data publicly available since 2006 and companies breaking the law face fines of up to US$800.