Personal information of veterans of the Ukrainian army, who fought against joint Russian-separatist forces in the Donbas, leaked in a recent hacker attack, Ukraine’s Cyber Police reported on Nov. 17.
Earlier this week an anonymous Twitter account @opanon_pl posted a link to 2,000 files with personal data of veterans that it allegedly had obtained from the Ministry of Interior of Affairs of Ukraine.
Cyber Police said that the hackers breached the local network of the State Service on War Veterans Affairs through a computer of one of its employees.
The leak included full names, birth dates, phone numbers and individual tax numbers of Ukrainians who fought in the Donbas.
Twitter account “Anonymous Poland,” that originally leaked the archives online, falsely claimed to be linked to Bellingcat, an investigative research team known for its open source investigation on Malaysian Airlines (MH17) passenger plane downing in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Bellingcat team immediately denied any relation and reported fake account for impersonation. However, Twitter didn’t find any violation of its policy. @opanon_pl was briefly suspended by Twitter but as of today it still exists with over 2,000 followers and has its tweets protected.
According to Ben Nimmo, information defense fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lad at the Atlantic Council, the account had nothing to do with the real Anonymous hacktivist group either.
Nimmo concluded that @opanon_pl was a sleeper account, which was created in 2012 and remained inactive until November, when it was repurposed for this particular leak. It was amplified by at least 15 other hacked accounts.
It is unlikely to be a Polish account either.
“No relation to Bellingcat, and almost certainly none to the real Anonymous,” Nimmo wrote. “For an ostensibly Polish account, @opanon_pl almost doesn’t use Polish – much more broken English and Ukrainian.”
