Belarusian hacktivist group claims cyber attack on central university, demands release of political prisoners

A Belarusian hacktivist group ideologically opposed to the country’s regime has claimed to have infiltrated the internal networks of Belarus’s largest state-owned university and stolen several terabytes of data.

 

In a social media post, the Belarusian hacktivist group that calls itself Belarusian Cyber-Partisans, claimed that it targeted Belarusian State University (BSU) with a significant cyber attack. The group also shared certain photos and screenshots taken from the University’s internal network to support its claims.

 

“We started working on this attack 2 months ago after BSU posted a video with a student who was humiliated & forced to apologize. Since 2020 many students were detained and staff let go for political positions,” the group tweeted.

 

Belarusian Cyber-Partisans said it successfully shut down the university’s domain controllers, encrypted its workstations, downloaded 3 terabytes of data, and wiped accounting, cloud services, mail, file servers, backups, and employees’ files.

 

“An educational institution that acts in the style of punitive agencies gets what it deserves. Our message for all organizations & institutions of #Belarus: act as criminals of the regime, then you become a target for us as accomplices of dictatorship and violence,” the hacktivist group added.

 

The group is now demanding that the Aleksandr Lukashenko government must release “50 political prisoners” in exchange for the 3 terabytes of data it took from the university’s servers.

 

Refuting the claims of the cyber criminals, Belarusian State University officials said that t did not suffer any cyber security incident and that the photos and screenshots posted by the hacker group are fake or morphed.

 

“Information disseminated on the Internet about a DDos attack on BSU is unreliable. The university experienced a technical failure of the data processing system as a result of updating the system from Microsoft servers.

 

“The distributed screenshots and photos are unreliable, falsified, and processed in graphic editors. IT-specialists of the university are actively working to eliminate the technical failure,” the University said on its Telegram channel.

 

It’s not clear whether BSU’s network was indeed hacked or whether the threat actors’ claims are false, however, BSU’s official website bsu[.]by has remained offline since Wednesday.