On Saturday morning, a powerful cyberattack on the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) infrastructure erased all documents, files, aircraft registration data, and emails from the servers. In total, approximately 65 terabytes of data were erased. When the news broke on Monday morning, the agency’s official website (favt.ru) went down as well.
Officially, the Russian Federation has not confirmed anything, but has blamed it on a temporary lack of internet access and a malfunction in Rosaviatsia’s electronic document flow system, for which they have switched to a (pen and) paper version: information exchange will take place via AFTN channel (for urgent short message) and postal mail.
The attack is said to have occurred as a result of the company LLC “InfAvia,” which operates Rosaviatsia’s IT infrastructure, failing to meet contractual obligations. “The prosecutor’s office and the FSB have been sitting at Rosaviatsia since Saturday,” a source close to the case said.
The authorities are now searching for a backup, if one exists. According to the Aviation Herald, there is no backup of these data due to a lack of funds allocated by Russia’s Ministry of Finance.
