Hackers destroy 43 TB of data connected to Russia’s electronic military draft record, setting back some mobilization efforts by “several months”

An anonymous hacker group has destroyed a large part of the IT infrastructure of the Kazan-based company Mikord, one of the key developers of Russia’s Unified Military Registration Record (Единый реестр воинского учета, or “ERVU”), Mikord’s CEO said during an internal call. A video recording of the call, along with other materials, was given by the hackers to the human rights organization Get Lost (Idite Lesom), according to the independent investigative outlet Important Stories.

“To give you an understanding, they destroyed everything — Jira, Confluence, Git. The task tracker for developers, the technical documentation base, the source code repository for the registry, and Mikord’s other products — there is nothing left at all. The only source code that exists is what’s on your computers,” Mikord CEO Ramil Gabdrakhmanov said during a mid-December call, which was held using the Russian video service Yandex Telemost. He said the team would be unable to work for at least a week.

Gabdrakhmanov also said the company would be forced to purchase new laptops for employees because of the attack. The company has begun setting up new infrastructure in which “everything will be secure and safe,” he said.

The hackers told Get Lost that they had destroyed more than 80 Mikord servers with 43 terabytes of data, including 12 terabytes of backups. The group said the attack would delay development of the registry by several months at least.

Get Lost reported the hack of Mikord on Dec. 11. The founder of the human rights project, Grigory Sverdlin, said the website for the draft summons registry, which is part of Russia’s new Unified Military Registration Record, was offline from Dec. 5 to Dec. 10 due to what the company described as “technical work.” During that period, Sverdlin said, Get Lost did not receive a single report of electronic draft notices being sent out.