Hackers claim theft of 23 TB of Rosstat data. Agency confirms attack but denies leak

The hacker groups Silent Crow from Ukraine and the Cyber Partisans from Belarus have reported hacking Rosstat and stealing 23 TB of data, including information on Russian losses in the war against Ukraine. Rosstat confirmed a cyberattack but denied any information leak. The agency's website is currently unavailable.

Minsk, as far as is known from reports, calls the Cyber Partisans an extremist formation: under Belarusian law, mentioning such a group may carry legal risks. The hackers' claims cannot be independently verified: there is no confirmation other than their own words.

According to the hackers, they gained access to a "significant part of the IT infrastructure" and extracted 23 TB of data. They say they connected to about 25000 computers and servers, including the systems of the central office and regional departments.

The allegedly stolen material includes demographic statistics, population census materials and about 2 TB of internal documents.

Silent Crow said it had come into possession of "information relating to Russian military losses during the war against Ukraine, including data held in Rosstat's systems." The Cyber Partisans claim they destroyed the key data storage and processing systems on the site. The hackers left the message "No one will escape responsibility" in Belarusian on the site's pages, along with the logos of their groups.

As The Insider found, Rosstat does record deaths resulting from military action: such a category exists in the agency's official methodology. However, since 2024 Rosstat has stopped publishing final statistics on causes of death, and other data that made it possible to indirectly assess the consequences of the war have also disappeared from open access.

Rosstat's press service said the agency's information resources have been under cyberattack since 29 October. According to it, the attacks were carefully prepared and ran across the entire range of information technologies in use, involving a large number of specialists of various profiles and a wide geography of sources.

Representatives of the statistical service promised to restore access to the site in the near future.