Belarusian hackers are trying to overthrow the Lukashenko regime
A group of activist-hackers in Belarus has infiltrated almost every part of the the country’s authoritarian government in a bid to overthrow the Lukashenko regime, according to MIT’s Technology Review and Bloomberg. The hackers, known as Belarus Cyber Partisans, have been leaking information they found on sensitive police and government networks. They first started defacing government websites as an act of protest in September 2020 following the country’s disputed election, in which Alexander Lukashenko’s win was widely considered as fraudulent. But they also publish the information they get on Telegram, where they have 77,000 subscribers.
The group told the publications that it’s made up of 15 IT and cybersecurity experts working in the country’s tech sector. None of them are “professional hackers,” a spokesperson told Tech Review, with only four out of 15 doing the actual “ethical hacking.”
The Partisans’ most recent attacks gave them access to drone footage from the government’s crackdowns on protests last year and the Ministry of Interior Affairs’ mobile phone surveillance database. They also apparently got access to emergency services’ audio recordings, as well as video feeds from road speed and isolation cell surveillance cameras. The data the group released over the past weeks …read more