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Hackers Release Data Trove From Belarus in Bid To Overthrow Lukashenko Regime (bloomberg.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Opponents of the Belarus government said they have pulled off an audacious hack that has compromised dozens of police and interior ministry databases as part of a broad effort to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko's regime. From a report: The Belarusian Cyber Partisans, as the hackers call themselves, have in recent weeks released portions of a huge data trove they say includes some of the country's most secret police and government databases. The information contains lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system, according to interviews with the hackers and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Among the pilfered documents are personal details about Lukashenko's inner circle and intelligence officers. In addition, there are mortality statistics indicating that thousands more people in Belarus died from Covid-19 than the government has publicly acknowledged, the documents suggest. In an interview and on social media, the hackers said they also sabotaged more than 240 surveillance cameras in Belarus and are preparing to shut down government computers with malicious software named X-App.
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Hackers Release Data Trove From Belarus in Bid To Overthrow Lukashenko Regime More

Hackers Release Data Trove From Belarus in Bid To Overthrow Lukashenko Regime

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  • Imagine if that were done in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:01PM (#61726061)
    Literally nobody would care and would just respond with "it's not true, it's a conspiracy to take down {{name}}" or "yeah, well, even if it is true, {{name}} is good at their job, so it's fine".

    • Came here to say that his supporters are likely to say the same thing. Taking down a regime with information only works in a reasonably healthy democracy.

      • Unless of course you can find something that causes an international stink large enough.

      • Generally yes, but this information includes the identities of informants for the state. While it's not a stake through Lukashenko's heart, it's going to be of some material advantage to the opposition to know who the snitches are.

      • It just might make some of his supporters fearful since their private details have been exposed.

        I think at one time (when this protest started), people were attempting to ID the masked security people and there was some reduction of the voilence by some security officers due to the fear of being unmasked and targetted.

        Now, even if they want to go overseas on holidays, they may not be allowed to enter by some foreign government, or they may get a taste of their own medicine by those self exiled people from B

    • Yes, exactly why Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were never prosecutedâ¦

    • Re:Imagine if that were done in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:11PM (#61726095) Journal

      Overthrowing Lukashenko is only going to happen if the Kremlin lets it happen. I can imagine Putin tiring of Lukashenko, but if he's replaced, it's because his replacement passes muster with Russia. Russia is not going to allow a country literally on its doorstep be transformed into a liberal democracy. Russia feels enough of that happened while it was in social and political convulsions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it's not handing NATO any more prizes.

      • Here in non-sovereign Serbia we have four bosses: EU, US, Russia and China. Serbian government caters to all of them, to the detriment of Serbian people. Impossible to overthrow them at the moment.
    • With this information ordinary citizens can identify the masked police beating them in the streets and prisons, and stop serving them in shops, restaurants etc, spit on them when they are at the park with their families. That kind of thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      In this case, they're literally saying that it's a conspiracy to take down Lukashenko.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's worth learning to recognize that tactic. It's called "never play defence".

      They can't argue against the facts, the hard evidence. So instead they try to move the argument on to something else that nobody can prove either way. Conspiracy theories and accusations of bias are popular because they are mostly subjective and easy to google links for. In your example "good at their job" draws the person who presenting the cold hard facts into a subjective debate about if they really are good at their job or no

  • will always matter more than who's got the nerds with apps.

    History has yet to prove otherwise.

    It can certainly go the other way, given how short the history of nerds with apps is, but Lukashenko came to power before apps and before fax machines came to that part of the world.

    So...yeah.

    Good luck but I'm not optimistic that revolutions can happen over zoom.

    • sadly, both sides have guns. it's going to be a real mess and I don't have a crystal ball to tell you who is going to win.

    • Whilst ensuring that all police officers and soldiers and their parents have to be housed in separate areas because the people know who they are will get messy fast.

      Meanwhile zeroing the balances of all government departments, employees etc and ensuring the money departs out of the country will get painful fast. Sabotaging the electricity system will also get interesting quite rapidly.

      But yeah - it's not going to be nice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        You seem to think that "people" is an organised group of trained killers. In reality, the opposite is true. So when someone decides to larp as a revolutionary/killer next and goes for an informer, they'll get the same thing that previous larpers did even if they can't reach the larper him/herself.

        KGB will show up at their relatives' and friends' doors. All of them. They'll question everyone to find out who it is that you care about the most. Those people will have stern talking to. The kind of talking that

        • Molotov cocktails through the windows of several thousand of such reprobates would be beyond the power of the KGB to investigate. Through the windows of one or two won't make a difference.

          AFAIK there's never been a release of this sort of information before, so it's not clear what might happen.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            I find it hilarious that you are suggesting that mass mobilisation by civilian population and mass procurement and construction of weaponry is the solution to being watched, when in real world, that's how you get fucked. It's hard to stop a couple of molotov coctails being made and moved because that doesn't require much materiel, logistics or manpower and is therefore inherently covert. It's why Chinese don't let you fuel a canister at a gas station in many regions.

            A thousand?

            That's the kind of naive and s

  • Lukashenko and colleagues won't care. Not a jot.

    They'll have their exit plans - if they plan to exit at all - laid long since.

  • The difference between a Russian-backed hack and a US-backend hack? Well, the name of the group ("Belarusian Cyber Partisans" sounds way better). Imagine the scandal if China backed Afghanistan's talibans hackers to gain access to state secret (or government member personal information) in order to help their take-over or threaten them...

    • Well, we literally created the Taliban ("ban" already is the plural. The singular is "a talib", which is actually their word for basically their version of a verger).

      When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and the Afghanis couldn't stop them, the US recruited Pakistani mercenaries to help out. Pakistan, because together with Saudi-Arabia they are the US allies in the region. They were of course financed, armed, and trained. Problem is: Pakistan and Saudi-Arabia are also the two most extremist religious count

      • The current Taliban can count on a pretty broad support. Even the original Taliban were relatively organic.We just like to think that they are totally unauthentic . They came out of the refugee camps in about 94 . One does wonder whether anything would have come of them without financial support but it is too easy to just dismiss them. Even the eighties war started as a conflict between the feminist cityslickers(because communist) and the wildly different traditional countryfolk. After Russia came in and ki

  • Nobody's ashamed of it.

    Yes, the EU has "state-sponsored hackers" too. And all the other Internet warfare and spying assholery we berate other regimes for.

    And when, for a change, they attack an asshole, there's no reason to act like we're innocent choir boys and our shit don't stink.

    There's no shame in exposing an asshole. But there's big shame in acting like we're not doing the same stuff that e.g. Putin [always pronounce it in French [wiktionary.org] ;] does.

  • China (Score:3)

    by mcswell ( 1102107 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @10:46PM (#61727123)

    Now if they tried that on China...

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