Anonymous Hacker Group Allegedly Hacked Sberbank, Russia’s Largest Bank

Anonymous has allegedly hacked one of the largest financial institutions in Russia, Sberbank.

The hacktivist collective announced this on social media, saying that they have obtained and also thousands of 5,030 emails, phone numbers, and addresses, from the compromised Sberbank's database.

The post redirects to an archive with five Excel files, which contain information about the bank’s free safe deposit boxes since June 14, 2016, as well as a register of property and partner appraisers, a list of the types of traded futures contracts, and a blank template of a certificate of property status and obligations.

Previously, analysts from cybersecurity firm DeviceLock had disclosed information on a big Sberbank data leak with the newspaper Kommersant in October 2019.

Later, on the black market, the private details of up to 60 million Sberbank credit cards have been put up for auction.

It was considered one of the largest data leak in Russian financial history.

Shortly after the Russian armed forces crossed the Ukrainian border in late February, Anonymous declared a cyberwar on Russia, vowing to disrupt the country’s internet.

In March, the hacktivist collective said it has published 28GB of documents belonging to the Central Bank of Russia, including some of the monetary authority’s “secret agreements.” In early May, the Anonymous-affiliated hacking group Network Battalion 65 (NB65) announced it hit the popular Russian payment processor Qiwi.

And this time, PJSC Sberbank, has become its target.

Sberbank is a Russian majority state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow. It was called Sberbank of Russia until 2015, before its name shortened to just Sber.

Sberbank has presence in a number of European nations, but primarily, its operations centered in post-Soviet countries.

By 2022, the bank accounted for about a third of all bank assets in Russia.

The bank's rise since 1990s is in part due to its close connections to the Russian government. As of 2014 it was the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the third largest in Europe, ranked 60th in the world and first in central and Eastern Europe in The Banker's Top 1000 World Banks ranking.[10] In the world ranking of public companies Forbes "Global 2000" Sberbank takes 51st place.

But since Russian Vladimir Putin started invading Ukraine, Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s invasion have affected its operations.

At the end of February, Sberbank Europe said it was leaving the European market.

As long as Russia keeps invading Ukraine, cyber groups from all over the world will continue invading Russia's.

Many of cyberattacks are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where website servers are flooded with traffic to the point that they’re unusable. Various Ukrainian bank and government websites were knocked offline earlier this month, following attacks that were later attributed by Ukrainian, U.S. and U.K. officials to Russia.

Read: Russia-Ukraine War On The Internet: Between Cyberattacks To Censorship, Encrypted Messages And More

Not only Sberbank was affected, as later, the website for the Moscow Stock Exchange also went down and was inaccessible.

But the exchange was down not because of Anonymous, but because of the impact of global sanctions led to the ruble dropping to a record low against U.S. dollar.

The London-listed shares of Sberbank plunged 70% amid a major selloff of Russian stocks like Lukoil that trade on the London Stock Exchange.

"We can confirm the Moscow Exchange website is down, but we don't have visibility into the incident’s root cause or the extent of the disruption," said a spokesperson for NetBlocks, which tracks internet connectivity across the world.

So here, website outages are frequent.

Beside financial institutions, targets include numerous government targets, including the official Kremlin website, RT, the Russian state-funded TV station under scrutiny for its ties to the Kremlin propaganda machine, state news agency Tass, and more.

Forbes Russia also suffered defacements.

Computer wiping malware was also seen to spread across Ukrainian financial, defense, aviation and IT services organizations.

Ultimately, hackers hope to damage Russia's digital infrastructure, hoping to force Russia to disconnect from the global internet.

It's worth noting that the Anonymous has also hacked into Roskomnadzor, which is Russian state media regulator.

Following the hack, the group released 363,994 files it has stolen from the agency for the public to see.