The Real Russia. Today. Yandex leaks tons of Google Doc info, new Russian mercs in Syria, and the hackers are back

Friday, July 6, 2018

This day in history. On July 6, 1923, the first Soviet Constitution entered force, formally establishing the USSR's government and ministerial infrastructure.

• Meduza examines how Yandex leaked a bunch of private information Google Docs users were foolish enough to share publicly
• With a slip of the lip, a Russian senior lieutenant supplies more evidence of Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine
• A new Russian mercenary group is reportedly fighting in Syria
• The Kremlin will consider legalizing mercenary groups
• Hackers carry out the year's first attack on a Russian bank, stealing almost a million dollars
• A former hacktivist leader might get early parole
• Researchers say Russia Today's director of information broadcasting committed academic plagiarism
• Putin is cooking up “at least one deal” for Trump to tout after their Helsinki summit
• Putin has kind words for Russia's bloggers
• It turns out that one of Russia's newest treason suspects is a captain in Russia’s Army Reserve and a military history fanatic
• Most Russians expect to win Saturday's quarterfinals game

Dirty public secrets 🤫

On the evening of July 4, Russian Internet users realized that the search engine Yandex has been indexing a surprising array of information stored on Google Docs, including files containing passwords, credit card numbers, and corporate documents. Yandex’s press service says the company’s actions were perfectly legitimate, but within hours of Wednesday’s discovery the search engine stopped producing any hyperlinks to Google Docs. Meduza takes a closer look at what information leaked to the public because of this unintended loophole.

• Read the whole story: “Yandex leaks internal Google Docs apparently shared by Russian banks, state officials, and Internet trolls”

Neighborhood adventures 🛂

On trial for the death of a soldier under his command, Senior Lieutenant Oleg Leontyev asked a court on Friday to tailor his sentence so that he is able to continue his military service with Russian troops now in Syria. His final plea to the judge included an unsubtle wink at Moscow’s unofficial armed intervention in eastern Ukraine. Explaining his wish to fight in Syria, Leontyev said, “I’ve already participated in one of these operations, but the only thing is that it was on the territory of a neighboring country where we were absent, as it were.”

During exercises on February 6, 2018, Leontyev allegedly ordered a Russian conscript named Igor Gorbunov to outmaneuver a tank, resulting in the soldier’s death. Prosecutors say Gorbunov didn’t yet have sufficient training to carry out Leontyev’s order. The soldier’s family believes that his fellow soldiers killed him and staged his death at the training exercise.

Officials in Moscow have repeatedly denied the Russian military’s involvement in eastern Ukraine, despite persuasive evidence to the contrary. The Kremlin has long insisted that any Russians fighting in Ukraine’s separatist-controlled areas are there only as private citizens.

Meet the new mercs 💰

A new Russian mercenary group is reportedly active in Syria. According to the independent television station Dozhd, the new private military group is called “Patriot,” and it apparently has linked to the Russian Defense Ministry. Sources told Dozhd that several of the combatants in Patriot are actually still listed as active Russian military personnel.

“Defense Ministry officers, comparing the new PMC to the Wagner Group, noted that Patriot pays more and offers better combat assignments. [...] A source in the veterans’ community said Wagner and Patriot competed for the contract to provide security at gold mines in the Central African Republic,” Dozhd reported.

Mercenary work is technically illegal in Russia, but that hasn’t stopped the “Wagner” PMC from extensive operations in Syria and eastern Ukraine. In December 2016, Wagner’s supposed chief commander, Dmitry Utkin, attended a banquet at the Kremlin, where reporters learned that he’d received the Order of Courage award. Wagner is allegedly controlled by Evgeny Prigozhin, a catering business magnate who’s also behind Russia’s infamous “troll factory,” the Internet Research Agency.

⚖️ Legalize it?

Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin's spokesperson, said on Friday that the Kremlin will consider an appeal for the legalization of private military companies in Russia. According to Dozhd, a petition to legalize mercenary groups is on its way to the president, the Attorney General's Office, and the Supreme Court. The appeal reportedly bears the signatures of retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, “Honor and Motherland” head Vladimir Petrov, and “All-Russian Officers' Committee” Chairman Evgeny Shabayev.

Return of the hackers

🏦 Bank robbers

Hackers stole more than 58 million rubles ($918,140) from Pir Bank, according the newspaper Kommersant, which calls the incident the first cyber-attack on a Russian bank in 2018. Sberbank CEO German Gref has attributed the theft to the advanced persistent threat “Carbanak.” Pir Bank is Russia’s 329th biggest bank.

The hackers reportedly stole the money through the Russian Central Bank’s Automated Workstation Client (an interbank fund transfer system similar to SWIFT), moving the stolen funds onto debit cards at 22 of Russia’s largest banks, before cashing out at different locations across the country.

Russia’s Central Bank previously claimed that there would be no future hacker attacks on its Automated Workstation Client system. These incidents first started occurring widely in 2016, when hackers mounted nine successful attacks, stealing an estimated 1.5 billion rubles ($23.8 million). A year later, there were 11 successful attacks, stealing 1.2 billion rubles ($19 million).

👾 Early parole?

Vladimir Anikeyev, the former leader of the hacktivist group “Anonymous International,” will get another shot at early parole. On Friday, the Moscow City Court ordered a review of his early release, after Anikeyev’s lawyers formally challenged his parole board’s rejection in January 2018. Either way, the hacker is due to go free by November 8, 2018, when his two-year prison sentence ends.

Federal Security Service agents captured Anikeyev in October 2016 and later detained two high-ranking FSB officers, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Sergey Mikhailov, based on Anikeyev’s testimony. The two FSB agents are suspected of taking control of the hacktivist group and using it to target state officials. Anonymous International stole private correspondence from various prominent Russian figures, leaking some to the media and auctioning off other materials.

More glory for Russia Today 🎓

The “Dissernet” community, which monitors Russian academics for plagiarism, is calling on the Moscow State Linguistic University to revoke Mikhail Solodovnikov’s doctorate in sociology. Solodovnikov currently serves as the director of information broadcasting at Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded media outlet.

According to Dissernet, Solodovnikov’s 2011 dissertation on “censorship as a mechanism of social control” is jam-packed with uncited content lifted from various textbooks and magazine publications. Researchers found plagiarized material on 54 of the dissertation’s 150 pages.

This isn’t the first time Dissernet has discovered plagiarism in the academic work of prominent state officials, and past reports have identified cheating by Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin, and former Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov. Russia’s Education Ministry refused to revoke Nikiforov’s doctorate, despite Dissernet’s findings.

News with Mr. Putin

🤝 Trump prep

“Kremlin officials are in intense negotiations with their counterparts in Washington to strike at least one deal they hope will let President Donald Trump tout his summit with Vladimir Putin as a triumph that justifies steps to repair relations.” Read the story at Bloomberg.

👨‍💻 Thanks, bloggers

Meeting with several soccer stars at the Kremlin on Friday, Vladimir Putin thanked the country’s sports fans for welcoming millions of foreign visitors during the FIFA World Cup, and credited “the so-called popular journalists, who work in a personal capacity on social networks,” with helping to “demolish” many stereotypes about Russia. The soccer tournament, Putin said, has shown the world Russia’s hospitality and friendliness to those who wish to visit.

A treasonous history buff? 📚

Last month, Russian federal agents arrested a man named Andrey Zhukov on suspicion of treason. The materials in his case are classified, but journalists at the magazine RBC learned that he is a captain in Russia’s Army Reserve, having served in an elite military unit outside Moscow. After being discharged, Zhukov reportedly worked for a company involved in rail transport.

Zhukov is a known military history fanatic who frequents Internet forums dedicated to military history. In 2012, he was a witness in a treason case against Sergey Cherepanov, a Russian officer tried for posting “classified documents about troop deployments.”

Expecting a win on Saturday ⚽

According to a new poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 68 percent of Russians say they plan to watch Saturday's World Cup game against Croatia, and more than half (56 percent) expect to win. The percentage of Russians who believe their national team could win the entire tournament is now up to 14 percent.