Pro-Ukrainian hackers' operation: Russia's Aeroflot cancels nearly 50 flights due to IT system failure

Russian airline Aeroflot cancelled nearly 50 flights on the morning of 28 July due to a malfunction in its information systems. Pro-Ukrainian hacker groups Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans BY have claimed responsibility.

Source: Aeroflot on Telegram

Details: The cancelled flights were due to depart from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, including services to Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.

"Passengers on cancelled flights can collect their checked baggage from the baggage claim hall at Sheremetyevo Airport. To avoid crowding, we kindly ask you to leave the airport," Aeroflot said.

Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans BY stated that they had successfully carried out a "lengthy and large-scale operation" that resulted in the complete compromise and destruction of Aeroflot’s internal IT infrastructure. According to the groups, they had been inside the company’s corporate network for a year, reaching the very core of its systems.

The hackers claim they managed to:

• Access and extract the full flight history database and compromise all critical corporate systems;
• Gain control over employees’ personal computers, including those of senior executives;
• Copy data from surveillance servers, including audio recordings of phone calls and intercepted communications;
• Extract information from staff monitoring and control systems.

As a result, around 7,000 servers – both physical and virtual – were destroyed. The volume of stolen data reportedly includes 12TB of databases, 8TB of Windows Share files, and 2TB of corporate emails.

"All these resources are now either inaccessible or destroyed, and recovery could cost tens of millions of dollars. The damage is strategic," the hackers said.

"We will begin publishing part of the obtained data shortly. We didn’t just destroy the infrastructure – we left our mark," they added.

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