Ukrainian hackers destroy data center used by Russian defense industry enterprises, Gazprom, Rosneft

Ukrainian hackers, linked to the Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) cyber department, have destroyed a data center used by Russian industrial giants. Among them are Gazprom, Lukoil, Telecom, and leading Russian defense industry enterprises.  

An Ukrinform correspondent learned this from own sources.

According to the source, more than 10,000 Russian legal entities have stored their data in the OwenCloud.ru cloud service. In particular, these are enterprises of the Russian defense industry, oil and gas, metallurgy, aerospace industry, as well as telecommunications giants. Among them are the Ural Civil Aviation Plant, Rubin Research and Production Enterprise, part of the Ruselectronics holding, Ural Special Equipment Plant, Gazprom, Transgaz, Lukoil, Rosneft, Norilsk Nickel, Rostelecom, Telecom, and Megafon.

According to sources, it was a joint operation of the Ukrainian hacker group BLACKJACK and the SBU Cyber Department. The successful operation resulted in the destruction of over 300TB of data. In particular, 400 virtual and 42 physical servers that hosted internal documentation, backups and other programs that allowed customers to remotely control production processes at enterprises.

"The destruction of the Russian cloud service was a retaliation for the attack on the Ukrainian Parkovyi data center in January this year," the source said.

As reported by Ukrinform, Russian hackers carry out nearly 4,500 cyberattacks on Ukraine annually. On December 12, 2023, Kyivstar became the target of a powerful hacker attack that led to a technical failure. Communication services and Internet access became unavailable.