#hacktivism

Rosstat, Russia's federal statistics agency, confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend of October 31 to November 1 but disputed its scale, The Record reports. The Belarusian Cyber Partisans and the pro-Ukrainian group Silent Crow say they spent months inside its network, then wiped servers overnight on Saturday, claiming access to about 25,000 devices and data that includes mortality records and information on Russian military casualties. Other reports put the claimed haul at 23 TB.

According to Kommersant, cited by The Record, Rosstat's main site and regional portals were defaced with a Belarusian-language warning. Rosstat said its systems detected the activity in time, that it found no evidence protected information leaked or databases were compromised, and that it is working with law enforcement.

The claims have not been independently verified; the groups say they will publish samples. The same two groups claimed the 2025 Aeroflot attack, and Russia's Supreme Court has designated both as extremist organizations.

A group calling itself the Department of Peace says it took personnel records from the Department of Homeland Security's login system and handed them to the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which published them on Wednesday, October 28, as "Icepick." According to WIRED and NPR, the data covers more than 41,000 employees and contractors: names, work email addresses, phone numbers and office locations, plus supervisors and the internal permission groups each person belongs to.

WIRED counts more than 21,000 records from Customs and Border Protection and about 10,000 from ICE, including staff in groups that court filings tie to certified undercover operations and wiretap programs. DDoSecrets says the data came from DHS's Okta system; Okta told WIRED it has no evidence its systems were compromised. DHS said it was "aware of a potential breach" and working to protect employees.

The release's backers call it an accountability tool; a Recorded Future analyst told WIRED it could help adversaries target staff. By Thursday, Bluesky was blocking links to the dataset and a searchable site was offline after a takedown notice filed for DHS, TechCrunch reports.