Thousands of Russian emails and documents were leaked online
in the late January in a catalogue named “The Dark Side of Kremlin”.
The catalogue was published by a “transparency collective”
which goes by the name of “Distributed Denial of Secrets”.
DDoS encompasses an anonymous group of journalists,
researchers, tech-experts and activists.
The documents contained private information regarding all
the major hot-shots of Russia including the politicians, religious figures and
the military.
The DDoS say, that their only job is to provide information
to those who need it. If the information strengthens suspicions it hardly
matters.
They also mentioned that their collection of data including
emails, chat logs and attachments were hacked a few years ago by several
hacking groups in Russia and Ukraine.
The Cyber Junta, Russian hackers Shaltai-Boltai, Ukrainian
Cyber Alliance and other international parties were among the few accused.
The information leaked includes private documents and emails
from the Ministry of Defense, the Russian Presidential Administration and other
high-level political operatives.
Russia’s Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev’s phone was hacked
and his holiday pictures were uploaded online.
Russian President’s chef who controls companies that cater
fancy banquets in Kremlin also lost his private notes to the leak.
The leak also includes the elaborate personal notes made by
the chef on conversations between Putin and European leaders from Italy and
Britain.
The most revealing hacks were the ones that came from the
Russian Presidential Administration, which fairly let the Russian government,
be a little more “transparent”.
The leak had details on how the government controls the
Russian media and the way it transmits messages etc.
The most concerning part is that no one knows for sure how
much and what kinds of information have been laid out bare in the open.
The leaks also provide an insight about the relations
between Ukraine and Russia.
The inner-doings of Russia’s proxies and other insidious
groups have also been brought into the light.
The DDoS had experienced a wipe on their servers making it
imperative for them to upload it soon, in order to prevent the data from being
censored.
Reportedly, this leak can’t be considered as a revenge for
anything that has happened before, it was just an attempt at transparency.
A lot of the information present in the leaks was already
available on the web but a lot of new investigations have been given birth due
to this massive leakage.
This Russian document leak has created a paradigm shift in
the way countries take their cyber-security seriously.
Analyzing these leaks could possibly lead Russia to adopting
a new way of securing the web and its Presidential administration.
The government has already
started taking care of its cyber-security vigilantly and all the loop holes
will soon be filled up.