As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its third week, unknown actors continue to attack Russian state-backed firms with a series of hacks and data breaches, the most recent seemingly referencing Hillary Clinton’s pro-hacktivism comments.
Transneft, the Russian state-controlled oil pipeline conglomerate, is the target. Distributed Denial of Secrets, a leak hosting website, published a link to 79GB of emails from the Omega Company, Transneft’s research and development branch, on Thursday.
Transneft, headquartered in Moscow, is the world’s largest pipeline corporation. As a state-owned Russian firm, it is currently barred from obtaining investments from the US market as a result of Russia’s sanctions.
The Omega Company, an in-house R&D unit, manufactures a variety of high-tech acoustic and temperature monitoring devices for oil pipelines, with an ironic concentration on leak detection.
The email dumps appear to include the contents of many email accounts belonging to corporate personnel, including not only email messages but also file attachments with invoices and product shipment details, as well as image files depicting server racks and other equipment configurations.
Some of the emails examined by BlueHillco were timestamped as recently as March 15th, only days before the hacked material was made public.
Unlikely, the source dedicated the disclosures to Hillary Clinton, according to a letter from Distributed Denial of Secrets that accompanied the email dump. In a February interview with MSNBC, Clinton took the unusual step of pushing Anonymous to undertake cyberattacks against Russia.
« People who love freedom and recognize that our way of life depends on assisting those who believe in freedom as well, » Clinton remarked, « might be engaged in online support of those in Russia’s streets. »
While the Ukrainian government actively encourages hacktivism against Russian government targets, it is unusual for a high-profile US lawmaker to take such a stance. Clinton’s statement could have been intended as a retort to her one-time presidential rival Donald Trump’s 2016 request to Russian hackers to reveal her private emails if they had them, in the aftermath of the Democratic National Committee’s email leak.
Despite the fact that data leaks have emerged as a prominent tool in hacktivists’ support for Ukraine, they have had little overall impact on the war’s outcome. Although analysts predicted that the battle would have a significant cyberwarfare component, it has mostly failed to materialize, in part because the Russian military continues to demolish Ukrainian houses and infrastructure through conventional means.
