A group of hackers connected with Anonymous have claimed they have leaked close to one million emails from Russia’s largest state media coporation.
The NB65 or Network Battalion 65 group, who are allied with the notorious hacker collective Anonymous, allegedly leaked more than 900,000 emails from the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK).
On Monday, NB65 reportedly shared the leaked emails with Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a non-profit whistleblower site for news leaks that has made the 786.2 GB cache available to the public as a torrent file.
Emma Best, a co-founder of DDoSecrets, described the leak as “an unprecedented exposure of state-owned media and propaganda which the Russian government considers essential to the state security.”
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In the wake of the reported release, NB65 announced that “all soldiers participating in the invasion of Ukraine should be subjected to a war crime tribunal.”
According to the Daily Dot, the emails cover more 20 years of communications and included exchanges relating to daily operations and sanctions imposed on Russia by other countries in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
Ms Best said NB65 provided DDoSecrets with over 800 GB of data, which after sorting and “de-duplication” came to a total of 786.2 GB.
In addition to the emails, she claimed to have been sent 4,000 files taken from VGTRK’s cloud service, mostly consisting of media assets and clips.
The All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) is Russia’s largest media corporation and operates five national television stations, two international networks, five radio stations, and over 80 regional TV and radio networks.
VGTRK also owns and runs to the information agency Rossiya Segodnya, which operates the news agency Sputnik.
Its well-known Rossiya 1 program reaches 98.5 per cent of the Russian population, while its international version is watched by people across the US, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and China.
The media group is often accused of spreading misinformation on behalf of the Kremlin.
On Tuesday, NB65 also claimed to have “hacked sideways” the Russian wesbite Continent Express - continent[dot]ru - following the reports of atrocities by Putin’s troops in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
“The gloves, as they say, are off,” the collective tweeted, as NB65 said it had “smoked” the sites backups and locked its databases.
Continent Express describes itself as the largest independent Travel Management Company in the Russian Federation.
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