The propagandists of the Belarusian Telegraph Agency (BelTA) harm the Belarusian people on a par with the punishers from Lukashenka's Ministry of Internal Affairs and special services. All the years of dictatorship they poison the minds of Belarusians with lies and manipulations to please the tyrant. For this we strike a blow to the computer network of BelTA, paralyse the work of pro-government propaganda websites and destroy backups. 👊📛
💥 Internal network and main sites hacked.
💥 Domain controllers affected.
💥 Downloaded 90GB of data (internal documents, accounting, personal data of employees). The rest is propaganda trash, should be burned rather than downloaded.
💥 Cleared all accounting, workstations, archives, backups, website servers.
Details Of the Hack
We launched the cyberattack on 29 December. The date was specially chosen so that the propagandists' New Year holidays would be "successful". The network was attacked right from the morning, when employees had just arrived at the BelTA office and switched on their computers.
As one of the Cyberpartisans comments:
Let the accomplices of the dictatorship have no holidays until they return the country to the people.
And we also wanted to please the worthy Belarusians, so that at least for the New Year they could have fun and have a good reason to celebrate the holiday and drink champagne.
Usually, an attack on an organisation's internal network takes weeks to months to develop. But, according to our information, someone had tried to encrypt Belta's network before, only they didn't follow through. We knew that the "holes" in the network had not been fixed since then, so we decided to take advantage of it.
BelTA employees do not observe even the minimum rules of computer security and information hygiene. For example, they used pirated software and systems. That's why they easily picked up our "cyber bombs" and suffered heavy losses. 😎
As one of the participants in the attack comments:
When the admins were fussing and trying to put out the 'fires', we quietly watched them and continued to mash the servers and interfere with their work.
Now, according to our information, work in BelTA is virtually paralysed. Employees are forced to try to perform tasks from their home computers. The work equipment refuses to work as it should. Many have no access to mail and usual work chats.
We believe that Lukashenko's propagandists fully deserve this for their years of lies, manipulation and filth against free-thinking Belarusians. They deliberately condone harsh political censorship and repression, including against independent media: seizure of TUT.BY domains, squeezing freedom of speech out of the country, arrests on political grounds, and so on.
By the way, the bosses forbade BelTA employees to talk about our cyberattack. 🤫 We won't be surprised if, as usual, they deny everything, as usual for the arrogant accomplices of the regime. But you all know what happens in that case. 😉