Two Ukrainian hacktivists have gained access to thousands of emails belonging to top Kremlin officials and have leaked a significant amount to the BBC.
The emails contain budgets and plans to send aid to pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine; some are linked to Vladislav Surkov, author of the current Russian political system and a key player in the Kremlin’s invasion in the Ukraine.
Although the emails given to the BBC contain mostly small details, “taken together they support the notion that Russia controls the separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine,” according to the site.
British journalist Eliot Higgins told the BBC, “We haven't seen a hack of this type before, showing so much direct linkage between the Kremlin and separatists on the ground.”
The BBC reports that the emails contain thousands of ordinary communications between Kremlin employees, and that the emails would be incredibly difficult to fake seeing as they had the correct coding and details of the servers they came from.
However, the Russian government is denying that Surkov even uses email. How convenient.
After Russia has been the alleged culprit of so many attacks against the U.S. in recent months, could they have been breached by two run-of-the-mill hacktivists?
Time Magazine reported that Victor Zhora, the head of Infosafe, one of Ukraine’s leading cybersecurity firms, “suspects the hackers may have had help from a foreign intelligence service - most likely a Western one,” based off of the resources that this attack would have required.
The Kremlin has denied all allegations about the hack and the contents of the emails; however, two other Russian officials’ emails were also compromised in this attack, which the BBC has yet to receive.