Ukrainian hacking group Silent Crow and the Belarusian group Cyber Partisans later claimed responsibility for the system malfunction, calling the attack a “long-term and large-scale operation” that led to the “complete compromise and destruction of Aeroflot’s internal IT infrastructure.”

The hackers alleged they had destroyed around 7,000 servers, accessed flight history databases, compromised critical corporate systems, taken control of employees’ personal computers and extracted data from surveillance and wiretapping servers.

Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office later confirmed that a cyberattack was the cause of the system malfunction at Aeroflot, saying it had launched a criminal investigation into the incident. It did not name the hacking groups.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that the reports of the hacker attack were “quite alarming.”

According to other sources, the head of Aeroflot has not changed his password since 2022, and the company's infrastructure was running on outdated versions of Windows XP and 2003. "The cybersecurity of Russia's key infrastructure is basically at the high school level," the NEXTA agency noted .

People are commenting on the event on social media.

“Jesus, a national airline with a three-year-old password? That’s negligence on a new level. No wonder the hackers got their way.” “It looks like they didn’t even pay for licenses. The domain controller in one of the published images didn’t even have Windows activated. So updates were out of the question.” “The password is said to be 1234.”

🤡 Aeroflot got hacked because of a three-year-old password — a state-level IT embarrassment

The Belarusian hacktivist group Cyber Partisans BY, who breached Aeroflot, claim the airline’s CEO hadn’t changed his password since 2022. The company’s cybersecurity? A total joke: they’re still running Windows XP and Server 2003, and employees ignore even the most basic digital hygiene. The hack was only a matter of time.

Here’s what we know:
🔵 Hackers wiretapped employees for over a year and downloaded all internal communications
🔵 The entire passenger flight history has been leaked
🔵 Some of the stolen data will reportedly be published soon

The cybersecurity of Russia’s key infrastructure is basically running at middle school level.