Alfa Bank denies leaking its customer database

The database of Alfa-Bank customers turned out to be on the darknet: it contains full names, passport details and phone numbers, as well as account balances. The editors of the Readovka portal announced this on their Telegram channel today, August 5.

The press service of Alfa-Bank told Kommersant that “the hosted file is out of date, there are no leaks, customer data is safe.” The press service also clarified that the bank’s security service regularly makes test purchases for so-called leaks to make sure that there are no databases with real customer data.

This is a fairly well-known and not new database, fragments of which periodically appear on the market, Ashot Oganesyan, the founder of the DLBI data leak intelligence and darknet monitoring service, confirmed to Kommersant. It is unlikely that it indicates new leaks and poses some kind of danger to Alfa-Bank customers, he said.

Earlier, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, Alexander Khinshtein, asked the government to allow Roskomnadzor to conduct business inspections on the facts of leaks. To do this, it is necessary to withdraw this segment of the companies’ activities from the moratorium on inspections until the end of 2022, introduced in March of this year. Alexander Khinshtein sent a corresponding letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in early August (see Kommersant dated August 4).

Tatyana Isakova