In retaliation for a cyber attack by Russia against the Ukrainian telecom giant Kyivstar, hackers associated with Ukraine's primary intelligence agency have infiltrated the computer systems of a Moscow-based internet provider, Reuters reports. The hackers, allegedly linked to Ukraine's spy agency, erased 20 terabytes of data from M9 Telecom, a relatively small Russian internet and TV provider, resulting in some Moscow residents experiencing internet service disruptions. Despite the hacking group's assertion that the company's website had been destroyed, the extent of the successful breach could not be independently verified by Reuters.

Thomson Reuters provides customers with products such as the business-to-business media tool Reuters Connect, legal research service and database Westlaw, the tax automation system ONESOURCE, online research suite of editorial and source materials Checkpoint, and other tools. The size of the open database the team discovered corresponds with the company using ElasticSearch, a data storage favored by enterprises dealing with extensive, constantly updated volumes of data. Media giant with $6.35 billion in revenue left at least three of its databases open At least 3TB of sensitive data exposed including Thomson Reuters plaintext passwords to third-party servers The data company collects is a treasure trove for threat actors, likely worth millions of dollars on underground criminal forums The company has immediately fixed the issue, and started notifying their customers Thomson Reuters downplayed the issue, saying it affects only a “small subset of Thomson Reuters Global Trade customers” The dataset was open for several days – malicious bots are capable of discovering instances within mere hours Threat actors could use the leak for attacks, from social engineering attacks to ransomware