The Electronic Data of Nearly Every Russian Has Been Leaked – Moscow’s Tech Watchdog

Izvestia said, citing a report produced by Russia’s data leak intelligence and darknet monitoring service (DLBI), between January and June this year alone, almost 150 separate data leaks resulted in 140 million Russian mobile numbers along with 46 million e-mail addresses, being compromised.

The July 29 article warned that fraudsters could use this information to deceive individuals, companies, and organizations and implied the authorities were getting things under control – something the DLBI statistics do not support.

Despite the fact that the number of individual leaks had reduced from more than 200 in the same period of 2023, the volume of information appearing on networks had increased by 14 percent. It also showed that the annual volume of identity theft in Russia has grown at a rate of about 40 percent per year since the service started studying the phenomena in 2019.

At the same time Russia’s communications, information technology and mass media supervisory body, Roskomnadzor, said that there had been around 70 cases of personal data leaks in 2024 compared to 110 in the last year. However, even this “positive” trend masks the fact that 600 million records entered the public domain compared with 200 million last year.

The watchdog assessed that this level of leaks, combined with earlier disclosures, means that the data relating to almost every Russian citizen is now publicly available.

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The DLBI study report shows that around 46 percent of leaks came from e-commerce activity, 16 percent after retail activity and around 10 percent from use of online searches or entertainment resources. In terms of volume of data lost, the majority is gleaned from activity in the financial sector. In just the first two months of the year more than 80 million records being subject to unauthorized access.

The President of Russia’s Association of Internet Trading Companies (AKIT), Artem Sokolov says that his members have invested heavily in technology to protect their information systems and have introduced high-level security systems that have allowed members to resist numerous cyberattacks.

“Many players in the online trading market are implementing processes of strict confidentiality of personal data so that not a single identifier or information directly or indirectly related to clients and partners can be compared with known leaks,” Sokolov said.

Roskomnadzor told Izvestia that most leaks came from third-party suppliers who don’t provide the proper level of information security and said it was working with industry to develop legislation to impose mandatory standards for working with electronic data.

Sokolov said such legislation is long overdue but the phrase “closing the stable door” leaps to mind and is probably too late for the 258 million registered Russian mobile phone users.