And not a friend, not an enemy, but a hack – Newspaper Kommersant No. 61 (7506) dated 04/08/2023

The number of cases of theft of trade secrets from companies located in countries unfriendly to Russia has doubled over the past year, cybersecurity experts found out. In countries such as China and Belarus, this indicator has risen by an average of only 3 percentage points year on year. On the one hand, hackers from different countries really began to interact more closely, on the other hand, in countries with the most developed IT infrastructure, information leaks are growing faster, experts point out.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the report of the developer of information security solutions InfoWatch, dedicated to information leaks in the world for 2022. According to InfoWatch, in general, the number of leaks increased 3.5 times compared to 2021, from 1.9 thousand incidents in 2021 to 6.8 thousand incidents in 2022. Personal data of citizens of different countries is present in 82.3% of leaks (in 2021, the figure was 84.2%). Among all types of data, the commercial secret segment turned out to be the most dynamic in terms of the level of compromise: confidential data of companies containing information about partners, counterparties and internal processes of organizations. “The geopolitical crisis has led to record levels of various cyber attacks and leaks in 2022,” said Semyon Botalov, an analyst at the Public Leak Research and IM Department of Threat Intelligence Group-IB.

InfoWatch noted that the share of leaks of trade secrets from companies in countries unfriendly to Russia – the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, etc. – doubled year on year, on average from 10.2% to 19.4% (the category of countries was selected based on the order of the government of the Russian Federation of October 29, 2022 No. 3216-r.).

At the same time, in countries friendly to Russia (China, Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Vietnam, India, etc.), the growth in the share of trade secret leaks in the total distribution of leaks is much less significant – 8.9% in 2022 against 5.1% in 2021

In friendly countries, the percentage of leaks from the financial sector has decreased (7.8% among leaks from all industries in 2022 against 9.8% in 2021). Among unfriendly states, the share of financial companies by industry, on the contrary, increased to 7.2% in 2022 against 4.9% in 2021, shared their observations in InfoWatch.

In Russia last year, cases of theft of trade secrets also became more frequent: by the summer, the share of databases containing confidential information of firms in the total array of disclosed data increased from 5.4% a year earlier to 13.7%. Experts attributed this, among other things, to the attacks of “hacktivists” who spoke out against Russia’s actions after the start of the military operation in February.

The latest trend is to unite various hacker groups for massive attacks, say cybersecurity experts. According to Semyon Botalov, Group-IB saw examples when groups united for cyberattacks on one specific country – “it’s not just about Russia, it happened, for example, with attacks on Indonesia.” And Anonymous Sudan recently announced that it is becoming “an official member of KILLNET,” a Russian-speaking group that positions itself as working on the side of Russia.

International government agencies are fighting against hacker groups operating in several countries at once: on April 5, according to the US Treasury, the work of the Genesis Market hacker trading platform was stopped (see Kommersant dated April 5).

If we talk about country statistics, then the share and growth rate of leaks from the United States and Germany will always be higher than, for example, from Vietnam and India – simply due to the level of digitalization of life and business, as well as the number of high-tech companies in their territory, the founder of the service points out. intelligence of data leaks and monitoring of the darknet DLBI Ashot Hovhannisyan. In addition, data leaks are not always the result of targeted external attacks, more often they are the result of insufficient awareness of company employees, their desire to earn money, or simply negligence, says Vladimir Ulyanov, head of the Zecurion analytical center.

Tatyana Isakova