The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies.
Following this operation, carried out by cyber units within Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence, military intelligence officers breached Russia’s federal taxation service central servers and 2,300 regional servers across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories.
As Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence says, the repercussions of the cyberattack have been severe, causing a breakdown in communication between Moscow’s central office and the 2,300 territorial departments that also got hacked in the attack.
It has led to a virtual collapse of one of Russia’s vital governmental agencies with a significant loss of tax-related data, according to GUR, as well as tax data-related internet traffic across Russia falling into the hands of Ukraine’s military hackers, as The Record first reported.
“This means a complete destruction of the infrastructure of one of the main state bodies of terrorist Russia and numerous related tax data for a long period,” GUR said.
GUR said it hacked Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency last month, gaining access to classified data and leaking it online.
The impact of these cyberattacks underscores Ukraine’s increased cyber warfare efforts against Russia, leveraging its military intelligence cyber units to disrupt critical Russian infrastructure.
Summary by smmry.com
How would a country’s tax department not have a backup system that can handle this? Surely they would know they are a prime target, and so have air-gapped backups in addition to an automated backup process?
I’m wondering how Ukraine know they got all the backups. Maybe they only got one or two levels of backup?
The attack also reportedly resulted in the complete deletion of configuration files crucial for the functionality of Russia’s extensive taxation system, wiping out both the main database and its backup copies
Maybe they think they’ve deleted all copies of a decryption key?
Software is amazingly fragile if you know what to look for and if you assume someone’s running the same setup as 90% of everyone else.
Valid question. But on the other hand, Russia doesn’t seem like they are well organized in anything they do. And normally they’re the ones hacking the rest of the world, they probably didn’t expect to be on the receiving end.
The chaos itself is worth a lot, but beyond that, the thing you have to understand in regimes like Russia is the massive incentive to never admit any kind of failure, which results in an increasing build-up of little lies as you move up the chain of command so that the dictator’s close circle can tell him that everything is wonderful, when on the ground it’s a disaster of people terrified to admit any kind of fault.
I’m actually wondering how many Russian billionaires are celebrating today that the tax department has lost the records of all the tax bills they haven’t paid.
Optimistically, whatever tax is not getting paid, it converts to money not being spent to continue the war. Realistically I would expect the government to cut every other expense but the war, so this is not going to influence the war short-term :(
The thread starter is probably right about civilians’ morale, cause they are going to be sucked dry of any money even faster with this kind of fuck-up from government
Yeah it’s the rich that benefit from this, same if it happened to the US. The rich take longer to audit than the poor
Fuck russia
Wanna release some info on which GOP politicians are on Russian bankrolls now?
That would be fake new and propaganda. To say one is being played by the enemy because you disagree with them is problematic at best. We should try to work out our differences instead of arresting our rivals.
I’m sure they will just restore it from the backup tapes. They weren’t so incompetent as to not keep offline backups right?
