The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies.
Following this operation, carried out by cyber units within Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence, military intelligence officers breached Russia’s federal taxation service central servers and 2,300 regional servers across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories.
As Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence says, the repercussions of the cyberattack have been severe, causing a breakdown in communication between Moscow’s central office and the 2,300 territorial departments that also got hacked in the attack.
It has led to a virtual collapse of one of Russia’s vital governmental agencies with a significant loss of tax-related data, according to GUR, as well as tax data-related internet traffic across Russia falling into the hands of Ukraine’s military hackers, as The Record first reported.
“This means a complete destruction of the infrastructure of one of the main state bodies of terrorist Russia and numerous related tax data for a long period,” GUR said.
GUR said it hacked Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency last month, gaining access to classified data and leaking it online.
The impact of these cyberattacks underscores Ukraine’s increased cyber warfare efforts against Russia, leveraging its military intelligence cyber units to disrupt critical Russian infrastructure.
Summary by smmry.com
How would a country’s tax department not have a backup system that can handle this? Surely they would know they are a prime target, and so have air-gapped backups in addition to an automated backup process?
from someone following the war, if the tax department is as competent as the military, yeah, not surprising
also there was a massive outflux of capable people when the war started, IT was one of the biggest
The chaos itself is worth a lot, but beyond that, the thing you have to understand in regimes like Russia is the massive incentive to never admit any kind of failure, which results in an increasing build-up of little lies as you move up the chain of command so that the dictator’s close circle can tell him that everything is wonderful, when on the ground it’s a disaster of people terrified to admit any kind of fault.
You assume the system were written this century and could even have those features.
Valid question. But on the other hand, Russia doesn’t seem like they are well organized in anything they do. And normally they’re the ones hacking the rest of the world, they probably didn’t expect to be on the receiving end.
Ah how I wish someone would delete the IRS’ records and backups 🥰
But on a relevant note, that is major! Hitting Russia in the wallet is going to hurt. The morale among the civilian population can get worse under this too.
I’m actually wondering how many Russian billionaires are celebrating today that the tax department has lost the records of all the tax bills they haven’t paid.
I bet a ton are. And probably not for current years but past years of making mistakes, whether on purpose or not are likely now gone and they effectively have a clean record.
But I wonder if they had anyone making payments. How are they going to know their balance? This is assuming their tax structure is similar to what the US has.
It could benefit a lot of people from all classes. But could also create a lot of havoc when the government demands to be paid and the people don’t agree with the numbers being demanded.
err, i think it dosen’t matter, biolionary already rule the country, so they weren’t going be held accountable to begin with
Optimistically, whatever tax is not getting paid, it converts to money not being spent to continue the war. Realistically I would expect the government to cut every other expense but the war, so this is not going to influence the war short-term :(
The thread starter is probably right about civilians’ morale, cause they are going to be sucked dry of any money even faster with this kind of fuck-up from government
Yeah it’s the rich that benefit from this, same if it happened to the US. The rich take longer to audit than the poor
To be fair I think Ukraine benefits from this too
I’m sure they will just restore it from the backup tapes. They weren’t so incompetent as to not keep offline backups right?
Wanna release some info on which GOP politicians are on Russian bankrolls now?
That would be a sweet sweet Christmas present.
Surely they sniffed and stole a bunch before wiping? Might not have been viable, but I can hope!
That would be fake new and propaganda. To say one is being played by the enemy because you disagree with them is problematic at best. We should try to work out our differences instead of arresting our rivals.
Well said, Comrad
So how does one hire their services? Asking for a country.
This seems like major strike for the Ukraine if true, but I assume the effects of the ensuing chaos might take a bit of time, because taxation data is kinda at the infrastructure planning and maintenance point and infrastructure takes a lot of energy or time to change (ie destroy/demilitarise in this case).
Just been in tax department, everything works normaly 🤷♂️
Let’s not call this a win. Cyber warfare is just going to harm ordinary civilians and shouldn’t be encouraged even if its a good cause.
