Novaya Gazeta Europe reports:
One of Russia’s most prominent pro-democracy organisations, the Free Russia Foundation, announced that it was investigating a potential cyberattack on Friday, following a leak of thousands of emails and documents related to its work.
On Thursday, Telegram channel SOTA reported that “more than 2,500 email chains and more than 13GB of electronic documents” from the Free Russia Foundation and The US Russia Foundation had been published online.
Read more at Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Free Russia’s full statement appears below:
Free Russia Foundation is closely monitoring the illegal dissemination of documents allegedly pertaining to our operations. We have launched an investigation to determine the origin, full extent and nature of this breach and to minimize risks to our staff, partners and beneficiaries.
Preliminary findings point to recent phishing attacks by the Kremlin-linked threat group known as Coldriver. A number of entities have been compromised, resulting in the theft of their correspondence, including grant reports and internal documents.
One of the possible goals of this criminal cyber-attack is to serve as a pretext to a new wave of repression against pro-democracy Russians.
— To get more details about this hacking attack, a detailed report from the organization Access Now is available via the following link in English
— For more information in Russian on how these hacks occurred, please watch this videoThis attack does not come as a surprise, as everyone who opposes Putin and his system, whether in our team or in other human rights or political opposition organizations, faces risk every day. This includes not only prominent organizations, but brave Russians who post anti-war leaflets, stage solo protests, or run anti-war blogs. Despite continuous attacks from the Kremlin and its agents, Free Russia Foundation remains committed to stopping the criminal war unleashed by Putin’s regime on Ukraine and to making Russia free and democratic.