Moscow school system hackers enlisted by city authorities

Three or four hackers who had compromised the Moscow Electronic School were noted by Moscow Deputy Mayor Anastasia Rakova to have been hired by the city to defend the digital education platform and its other services, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

Additional details on the cyberattack launched by the threat actors were not provided by Rakova to state-run media. However, MES was noted to have been impacted by a significant wave of ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks in September 2022, as well as a separate data leak later that year, which purportedly involved 17 million rows of personal data belonging to students, teachers, and parents, with the latter denied by Moscow authorities.

Enlisting leading threat actors has been done by Russia, with the hiring of a former hacker to lead its Center 18 cyber unit, and China, which has reportedly tapped such actors to exploit vulnerabilities to compromise U.S. organizations. Moreover, teen Department of Government Efficiency staffer Edward Coristine was also found to have been involved with cybercrime communities prior to his employment in the federal government.