Hero hackers claim to have breached Belarusian weapons firm

The international hacker collective Anonymous appears to have made good on its declaration of cyberwar against Russia and its allies, apparently exposing 200GB of emails from Belarusian weapons manufacturer Tetraedr.

Anonymous breached the firm’s defenses and released the most recent 1,000 emails from inboxes belonging to Tetraedr employees, passing them over in .EML format to the information transparency platform DDoSecrets. It also made public a complete archive of each inbox in .PST format, though the hackers noted that some files may have been corrupted by the export process.

Tetraedr is a private company founded in 2001 that specializes in making advanced radio-electronic weapons systems. It is based in Belarus, which has provided Vladimir Putin with logistical support in his invasion of Ukraine. Its dictatorial leader, Alexandr Lukashenko, has long been regarded as a puppet of Putin.

“Greetings, citizens of the world,” announced Anonymous in a statement on DDoSecrets, a non-profit whistleblower site set up in 2018. “We are the PWN-Bar Hack Team, we stand for equal opportunity pwnage and unrestricted access to information.”

The statement then took a mocking tone, with the hacking collective appearing to taunt Russia and its allies in the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) over the shoddy quality of their cyber defenses.

“Our Russian ATP friends seem kind of out of shape don’t they?” the statement continued. “We thought they needed a reminder of what real hacking is like. We were shocked with what we saw. They have the most secure servers ever - haha, just kidding…”

Declaring the start of #OpCyberBullyPutin, Anonymous declared: “We are going to show you how prepared for cyberwar Russia and CIS countries really are.” It then signed off with its trademark mantra: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”