Cyberattacks on Russian resources resulted in the leaking and emergence of over 300 million pieces of data into the public domain, including users’ personal data. Igor Lyapunov, Rostelecom’s vice president for cybersecurity, told Russian media correspondents about it at the Digital Industry of Industrial Russia conference in Nizhny Novgorod.
“We recently conducted an analysis of what is on the dark web, what has been posted is in the hundreds of millions. More than 300 million different data, records and personal user data leaked and were published,” Lyapunov said.
According to him, since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the conflict in cyberspace has gone through three stages. The first was noted in the first six months after the start of hostilities and only led to “losses of image”. “It was probably not a cyber war, but rather such a massive hooliganism against the computer resources of the Russian Federation. That is, large DDos attacks, the first pages of sites were hacked without causing significant damage,” Lyapunov said.
During the second stage of the cyber conflict, which began in July-August 2022, attackers targeted massive leaks. Since February 2023, Russia, according to Lyapunov, has entered the third stage of “cyber warfare”.
“Already the goal (of the attackers) is not just some kind of hooliganism, not just leaks, these are already attacks aimed at hacking and further destroying the infrastructure,” said the vice president of Rostelecom.
At the same time, the focus of attackers shifted from state administration and media to critical information infrastructure, production management and life support systems, Lyapunov pointed out.
He noted that Russia’s cybersecurity infrastructure “is constantly being built and adjusted in terms of strengthening and coordinating state attack repelling.” Lyapunov admitted that in some cases “the attackers will surely succeed”, but Russia, he said, is ready for the challenges. “That is to say, here I am rather optimistic, we have now embarked on the right path of constant improvement in cyber defense,” concluded the vice president of Rostelecom.
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