Personal data of 100 million Russians was made public in 2022

In Russia, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the scale of personal data leaks has increased dramatically. In 2022, the volume of “leaked” information will increase 40 times compared to last year, writes Izvestia with reference to the Group-IB report.

In total, data on about 100 million Russians, or a third of Russia’s entire population, is in the public domain. These are telephones, addresses, details of purchases and postal items. From July 2021 to June 2022, cybercriminals stole 970.5 million rows of personal data records from Russians. According to Group-IB experts, 2.4 crore lines were leaked during the same period a year ago.

At the same time, there are 823 million rows related to the February 2022 leak of the CDEK Delivery Service database. However, even without taking this into account, 147.5 million rows were available, six times more than the year before. Only about 100 million unique data were compromised.

Cyber ​​security experts attribute the sharp rise in leaks to “the current global crisis and the growing interest of hackers in publishing databases of Russian companies and websites”. As noted in Group-IB, some attackers are pursuing a monetary interest, but “the vast majority seek to cause reputational or economic harm to both business and the country.”

“In fact, two-thirds of the country’s population was suffering. This is mainly due to the cyber war launched against Russia. Large infrastructures were under the gun – large retailers, state-owned enterprises, without exaggeration, entire countries (for example, the Russian Post), the service sector – this is where this explosive growth comes from, “Dozer’s Product Center Says an Expert RTK-Solar Ruslan Dobrynin.

Anonymous, Ukraine’s IT Army, GhostSec and NB65 acted most actively against Russian government agencies and companies in 2022, said the head of cyberthreat research at the Positive Security expert center. technologies Denis Kuvshinov. At the same time, 30% of attacks fell on state-owned enterprises, 16% on IT companies, and 10% each on the financial, energy and industrial sectors.

Experts have warned that the intensity of hacker attacks may increase in 2023. But the amount of data leaking into the network will not increase. “Last year we learned how to really defend ourselves in combat conditions, and this experience cannot be underestimated. It will certainly be put into practice, so we expect that in 2023 the number of leaks, Especially the large and high-profile ones, there will be fewer than in 2022.