Hackers claim 23 terabytes stolen from Russia's statistics agency

Hackers claim to have pulled 23 terabytes of files from Russia's state statistics agency, including data on Russian wartime losses, after a coordinated attack that Rosstat says ran from 29 October to 1 November.

Messages from the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow groups appeared on Rosstat's main website and regional portals, the agency told the RBC news website. One message, in Belarusian, read: "No one will escape accountability." Both groups are designated as extremist and banned in Russia.

Rosstat said the attack was carefully planned, hitting several areas at once and involving specialists with different expertise working from a wide range of locations. The agency denied that any databases or legally protected information had leaked, saying its monitoring systems caught the suspicious activity in time for staff to respond. Its main website was inaccessible at the time of publication.

The hackers said the stolen files included data on Russian wartime losses, demographic and economic statistics, and documents marked "for official use only". Rosstat's official methodology includes a category for deaths resulting from military operations, but the agency stopped publishing its annual cause-of-death statistics in 2024, and other data that could help assess the war's impact has also disappeared from public access.

The same groups claimed responsibility for a July 2025 attack on Aeroflot's IT systems that caused widespread disruption; Russian prosecutors confirmed a cyberattack had taken place and opened a criminal investigation into unauthorised access to computer systems. In January 2025, Silent Crow claimed to have stolen a database of 2 billion records on property owners from the state real estate registry Rosreestr. The agency denied a leak, although journalists were able to verify some of the published information.