Long-awaited Kaspersky leak doesn't seem to be a leak at all
After teasing the hacker community for a few days, Network Battalion 65' (NB65) has released what it claims to be Kaspersky's source code. However, the so-called leak contains only information about Kaspersky that is or at some point was already publicly available.
After teasing the hacker community for a few days, Network Battalion 65' (NB65) has released what it claims to be Kaspersky's source code. However, the so-called leak contains only information about Kaspersky that is or at some point was already publicly available.
"As promised, NB65 has the source code dump for you all to enjoy. [...] Kaspersky has a lot of work to do, but I'm sure the intelligence community will have a field day with this. Don't forget that the fight goes on until Russia pulls back their military forces," it said.
Recently, Eugene Kaspersky's refusal to condemn the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine set the cybersecurity community on fire. Kaspersky, being a well-recognized brand worldwide, has always been haunted by its origins and put efforts to shake ties to the Russian government, including moving its core infrastructure from Russia to Switzerland and unsuccessfully suing the US government for its decision to ban the use of Kaspersky Lab within the US government.
Pro-Ukrainian hacktivists have been investigating the company's ties to the Kremlin for some time now. "I'm sure you'll find interesting relationships in this code. Glory to Ukraine," NB65 tweeted a couple of days ago.
Cybernews peeked into the leak, and it seems not to be a leak at all. Instead, it is an index of information on Kaspersky that is or was available (since Kaspersky closed some of the addresses) online anyways, including HTML markups, JavaScript scripts, CSS stylesheets, and binaries/libraries.
It looks like NB65 used a subdomain finder to find all addresses associated with kaspersky-labs.com and later scraped them for publicly available information. The leak does not contain any backend data.
The information in this particular "leak" could have been obtained by anyone using web scraping software to extract data from the websites.
NG65 kept the intelligence community on Twitter engaged for a couple of days.
"Less than 12 hours until Kaspersky code from their production, quality assurance, and staging servers is leaked. Plus a possible surprise or two that may cause the company a lot more stress than just the leak of some source code," Twitter user Ender Wiggin, claiming to be NB65 lead, said.
Now that same intelligence community is about to have "a field day unfollowing their accounts."
Recently, Cybernews has learned that Kaspersky Lab is protecting the resources of the Russian Ministry of Defence and other high-value domains that are instrumental to the Russian propaganda machine – Russia Today, TASS news agency, Gazprom bank.