Anonymous hacked 800GB data of Roskomnadzor which is responsible for censorship in the nation

Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency movement, has released what it claims is 800GB of data from a division of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government entity in charge of censorship in the nation.

The material was obtained through a hack, according to the website of Distributed Denial of Secrets, and Anonymous claimed responsibility. Roskomnadzor is the government agency that has just announced the blocking of Facebook and other websites in the country as the conflict in Ukraine escalates.

According to Distributed Denial of Secrets, the data originates from the Republic of Bashkortostan’s Roskomnadzor. The Republic of Bashkortostan is located in the country’s west.

Some of the disclosed data had references to the Republic of Bashkortostan, according to Motherboard.

“Appears genuine but I cannot vouch all of them of course,” Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who has extensively covered Russia’s censorship apparatus, told Motherboard in an online message after reviewing a small subsection of the files. “Right now I don’t see anything really surprising.”

According to the Distributed Denial of Secrets website, the data is divided into two primary categories: a sequence of over 360,000 files totaling 526.9GB and dating as recently as March 5, and two databases totaling 290.6GB.

“We will soon be releasing the raw data while we look for solutions to extracting the data. One appears to be a legal research database that was, according to the file timestamp, last modified in 2020. The other appears to be a database for HR procedures,” Distributed Denial of Secrets wrote on its website.