The last Russian hacker kick at the NATO summit: a questionable data leak
Given that the alleged leak occurred after the summit ended, it poses no threat to NATO leaders, who just took off from Vilnius.
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Pro-Russian activists are bragging about the leak of confidential information related to Lithuania’s preparations for the NATO Summit in the country’s capital city, Vilnius. Given that the alleged leak occurred after the summit ended, it poses no threat to NATO leaders, who just took off from Vilnius.
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Information about the alleged data leak occurred on the Telegram channel belonging to Boris Rozhin – an expert at the Center for Military-Political Journalism.
According to him, a hacker collective named From Russia with Love were responsible for leaking classified information about the organizational details of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, which took place in the capital city from July 11th - July 12th.
Cybernews has looked into the so-called data leak, and here’s a couple of highlights:
- In total, 29 files are circulating on Telegram
- One of the files is a list of hotels, detailing where each country’s delegation is staying for the summit. Which is no secret, at least to those of us who’ve been wandering the streets of Vilnius lately.
- Another document is a detailed list of the delegations’ arrival times. Again, no secret to locals who’ve spent quite some time at the International Vilnius Airport to witness Biden landing in Lithuania’s capital.
- The leaked batch also has information on guards from the following countries: Bulgaria, Finland, Norway, France, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. These seem to be more sensitive documents since they contain officers’ personally identifiable information, including full names, passport numbers, information about blood type, and phone numbers.
- The leak contains a VIP list with no names on it, just countries and rank.
- It contains other public information such as traffic restrictions during the NATO summit.
- It contains a few protocols from the preparation for the Summit.
- The leak contains a “sniper’s list” with shooters’ full names on it. Luckily, there’s no other personal information about the snipers.
Since the documents are not all that sensitive and were leaked only after the end of the summit, experts are not sounding alarm bells. The event went off without incident.
Lithuanian media outlet, 15min, were the first to report the alleged leak.
Russian hackers more of a nuisance
In the lead up to the NATO event, Russian threat actors had been promising a “doomsday” scenario of world catastrophe.
Yet, Lithuania's national cybersecurity center (NKSC) head Liudas Alisauskas told Cybernews earlier Wednesday, that from a cybersecurity perspective, the summit was “pretty boring."
While beneficial to Russian propaganda at home, not a single incident in the critical infrastructure took place, Alisauskas noted.
On the eve of the summit, Russian hackers were able to hack into a streaming music service and used it to broadcast Kremlin propaganda to shoppers at one grocery store.
Several DDoS attacks were also noted to have taken place against various Lithuanian websites the past few days, but again, with minimal disruption.
Cybernews will follow the story.