Ukrainian Hackers and Intel Officers Partner Up In Apparent Hack of a Top Russian Bank

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Two Ukrainian hacktivist groups are claiming to have broken into Russia's largest private bank, Alfa-Bank. In a blog post last week, the hackers from groups called KibOrg and NLB shared screenshots of what appears to be an internal database belonging to Alfa-Bank, as well as personal details of several Russian individuals as "confirmation" of the breach. Within the database, the hackers say there are over 30 million records including names, birthdates, account numbers and phone numbers of Russian customers. Adding some legitimacy to those claims, a Ukrainian intelligence official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation confirmed to NPR that Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency, the SBU, helped the hacktivists breach Alfa-Bank. The official did not share additional details about how the SBU participated or any further plans for sharing the stolen data. Ukrainian journalists including from cybersecurity website The Record previously reported on the connection to the SBU. While the hacktivists did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the breach, they wrote in the blog post -- posted on their own site -- that they would be sharing the data obtained from Alfa-Bank with investigative journalists. Alfa-Bank has not publicly responded to the news of the hack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.