As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth week, unconventional actors continue to target Russian state-backed companies with a series of hacks and data breaches — the latter ostensibly citing pro-hacktivist comments by Hillary Clinton.
The target organization is Transneft, the Russian state-controlled oil pipeline giant. On Thursday, the leaked hosting website Distributed Denial of Secrets published a link to 79GB of emails from the Omega Company, Transneft’s research and development division.
Transneft, headquartered in Moscow, is the largest pipeline company in the world. As a Russian state-owned enterprise, it is now blocked from receiving investment from the US market under sanctions against Russia.
Its own R&D unit, the Omega Company, produces a range of high-tech acoustic and temperature monitoring systems for oil pipelines, ironically focused on leak detection.
The email leaks appear to contain the contents of multiple company employee email accounts, including not only email messages, but also file attachments containing invoices and product shipping details, and image files showing server racks and other equipment configurations.
Some of the emails reviewed by The Verge had a timestamp of March 15, just days before the leaked data appeared online.
Unusually, according to a Distributed Denial of Secrets note accompanying the email upload, the source attributed the leaks to Hillary Clinton. In an interview with MSNBC in February, Clinton took the unconventional step: Anonymously encourage to launch cyber-attacks against Russia†
“People who love freedom and understand that our way of life depends on supporting those who also believe in freedom can engage in cyber-supporting people on the streets in Russia,” Clinton said.
While the Ukrainian government has actively encouraged hacktivism against Russian government targets, it is an unusual position for a high-profile US politician. Clinton’s statement may have been intended to echo her former presidential rival Donald Trump’s 2016 plea for Russian hackers to release her private emails if they had any, following the breach of the e-mails from the government. Democratic National Committee.
While data breaches have emerged as a key tactic in hacktivists’ support for Ukraine, they have so far had little overall impact on the course of the war. While analysts initially expected the conflict to include a pronounced cyberwarfare dimension, it has largely failed to materialize — in part because the Russian military continues to destroy Ukrainian homes and infrastructure by conventional means.
This post Russian pipeline company Transneft hit by data breach dedicated to Hillary Clinton
was original published at “https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983085/russia-transneft-omega-data-leak-hillary-clinton”