Rosstat confirms cyberattack as hackers claim 23 TB of data, including Russian war losses

Russia’s state statistics agency Rosstat said on Sunday that its websites had been hit by a coordinated cyberattack, while two hacking groups claimed to have stolen 23 terabytes of data, including information on Russian losses in the war in Ukraine, The Moscow Times and Kommersant reported.

What happened

• Messages from the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow appeared on Rosstat’s main site and regional portals; one, in Belarusian, read: “No one will escape accountability.” Both groups are designated extremist and banned in Russia.
• Rosstat said the attacks took place between 29 October and 1 November, were carefully planned and targeted several areas at once.
• The agency denied that any databases or legally protected information had leaked, saying its monitoring detected suspicious activity in time. Its main website was unavailable for a time.
• The hackers say the files include wartime loss data, demographic and economic statistics and documents marked “for official use only”. These claims could not be independently verified.

Background

Rosstat’s methodology includes a category for deaths from military operations, but the agency stopped publishing annual cause-of-death statistics in 2024, and other data that could help assess the war’s toll have also disappeared from public access, The Moscow Times noted. The same groups claimed the July 2025 attack on Aeroflot’s IT systems, which prosecutors confirmed was a cyberattack.

Editorial position

This paragraph is Sardaana’s editorial view, separate from the reported facts above. Hiding mortality statistics is part of the information blockade around the war: Russians are denied the data needed to judge its real cost. Independent estimates fill the gap — The Economist recently put Russian military deaths at roughly 374,000–770,000 and total casualties at 1.4–2.1 million, meaning that with the wounded the toll exceeds one million. Most of the dead are working-age men, which will deepen Russia’s demographic decline and leave the budget with lifelong obligations to the disabled and to veterans.