After hacking into the prison’s website, hackers posted a photo of Navalny, according to a CNN review of the hackers’ interviews, screenshots and data.
“Long live Alexei Navalny!” was written when the hackers hacked the website. These words were written on a photo of A. Navalny and his wife Julia from a political rally.
CNN reports that the hackers also stole a database containing information about inmates, their relatives and contacts. In addition, hackers claim that they also leaked data about prisoners in the Arctic prison colony, where on February 16 A. Navalnas died.
“The hackers share this data, including the phone numbers and emails of inmates and their relatives. email addresses in the hope that someone will be able to contact them and help understand what happened to A. Navalny,” a person who identified himself as a participant in the hack explained to CNN.
Food for a penny
Hackers used access to the Russian prison system’s online store, where family members buy food for inmates. They changed the prices of items like pasta and canned beef to one ruble, which is about 0.01 euro cent.
According to the hacker, it took the administrator of an online prison store several hours to notice that Russians were buying food for pennies. Three days had to pass before the technical staff of the prison store was able to completely stop the discounts given by the hackers.
“We were watching the online store login logs and they were just scrolling faster and faster and more and more customers were buying,” the hacker told CNN remotely.
He claims that the database contains information about approximately 800,000 people. prisoners, together with their relatives and contact persons.
A CNN review of the data found that the database contained some duplicate records, but still contained information on hundreds of thousands of people. The news portal managed to match several names of prisoners in the screenshots shared by the hackers with those who are currently in Russian prisons.
The online prison store hacked by hackers is owned by the Russian state and is officially called UAB Kaluzhskoe, according to Russian business documents reviewed by CNN. This company serves 34 regions of Russia.
A day after the hack, UAB Kaluzhskoe announced on Russian social media platform VK that it had experienced a “technical failure” that caused “the prices of food and essential goods to be incorrectly reflected.”
Cybersecurity expert Tom Hegel told CNN that the leaked data has all the hallmarks of authenticity and that it came from a hacked prison store.
“The hackers clearly had full access to get all of this,” Hegel explained. “The amount of images captured and data presented is quite thorough.”
A hacker group has sent letters to the administrators of an online prison store to warn them not to remove messages uploaded there from the site. They claimed that if they refused to do so, the hackers would retaliate by destroying the servers of one of the administrative computers.
The hacking of the online prison store was linked to a message posted by self-proclaimed Russian expats.
“We, IT specialists, have left today’s Russia,” one of the prison shop’s websites said in Russian. – We love our country and we will return when it is free from Vladimir Putin’s regime. And we will follow this path to the end.”
Prepared by CNN.
