web analytics
News and Threat Analysis

RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS ARE SELLING DATABASE OF THEIR TOURISTS

The headline must be really very scary for you and the details will leave you astonished. We trust legal authorities that at least they will keep our data safe but this huge happening had made this statement a myth. After reading the article , you will be afraid to share your details even with legal authorities .

This worldwide lock down has hit many industries . These industries includes Tourism as well. This lock down has led many people across world jobless. As a result, many people are going towards wrong ways to earn living.

One of the largest telecom provider in Russia, Rostelecom told RBC that from March to May 2020, the number of DDoS attacks (when attackers send a large number of requests to a specific resource in order to overload it and disable it) has grown five times as compared to the same period last year and exceeded 7 thousand. Analysis show that most of them were carried out by schoolchildren as they wanted to make electronic control inaccessible for themselves, and for parents which in turn can lead to cancellation of their examinations.

These crime rates were at a surge during this lock down and in between some higher authorities came forward and sell data of their tourists. Shocked ? The details will leave you aghast .

Analysis of Details

The selling of tourist data appeared on twitter yesterday at 12 AM midnight at the official twitter account of Department Situational and Crisis Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia which has a username @MID_travel on twitter .This is an official twitter account . The tweet crossed more than 287 retweets and 297 likes in just 12 hours and this account has currently more than 5k followers which itself is a big number to reach to the wider audience.

The twitter announcement offers to sell Tourists base of the Euphoria relevance June 2020 payments abroad at a fixed price of 66 bitcoins. Obviously, they can’t leak the database on twitter but they mentioned their jabber id(an Internet Message service which is based on XMPP) so that any customer who is interest in this offer can contact them. Jabber is one of the secure channel if one wants to communicate anonymously.

English Interpretation of the above message as done by our researchers

” For sale base “Tourists

June 2020 payments abroad “

The authenticity of the base is confirmed by this tweet,

as well as access to certain accounts.

Price 66 MTC

Jabber contact for purchase:fullflex.skynetzone@xmpp.jp

After 2 hours of this tweet, another tweet came from the same account which made a statement that there are more than 115,000 data in the database, including payment data.

CONCLUSION

It is predicted that this twitter account is hacked by some hackers who tried to break the trust and fame of higher authorities of Russia. At current situation, both the tweets that were done through this account has been deleted. Though Russian Authorities are yet to comment on the statement , we believe that it’s dead end from their side .