Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The group says they gained control of approx. 25,000 computers during the breach.
Russia’s own numbers on who dies in the war have been quietly disappearing from public view for more than two years.
Moscow’s state statistics office, Rosstat, has pulled dataset after dataset since the early phase of the full-scale invasion. The agency stopped publishing its annual cause-of-death breakdown in 2024, the last public tool outside analysts had used to estimate the war’s human cost, and hundreds of other Russian federal datasets have been withdrawn or stripped of substance since.
That blackout now has a direct challenger. Two hacktivist groups say they tore through Rosstat’s internal network between October 29 and November 1 and walked out with roughly 23 terabytes of data, including files they claim cover Russian military losses in Ukraine.
The Belarusian Cyber Partisans and the group known as Silent Crow jointly claimed the breach. Silent Crow said it had taken control of around 25,000 computers across Rosstat’s central office, regional branches and the Main Interregional Center for the Processing and Dissemination of Statistical Information, according to Ukrinform. A Belarusian-language line was left on compromised Rosstat pages: “No one will escape responsibility,” the Ukrainian outlet LB.ua reported.
Rosstat denies any leak
The agency confirmed its resources were attacked but rejected the scope. Rosstat said its monitoring systems picked up suspicious activity in time for staff to intervene, and that no databases or legally protected information were exposed, as reported by the South Korean outlet EconoTimes. The main Rosstat website remained unreachable when the first reports went out.
The hackers’ numbers remain their own. The two groups also diverged on volume. Cyber Partisans put the haul at more than 10 TB, while Silent Crow put it at about 23 TB, cybersecurity firm Brandefense noted, and neither group has yet released specific Russian casualty figures from the trove.
A track record of landed claims
Both groups have claimed earlier breaches that proved harder to dismiss than Russian officials first wanted. They jointly claimed the Aeroflot IT attack in July 2025, which Russian prosecutors confirmed and over which they opened a criminal investigation, Brandefense noted in the same analysis. Silent Crow earlier claimed a January 2025 breach of Russia’s property register Rosreestr, where journalists verified sample entries despite official denials.
Rosstat was once the main public source behind independent excess-mortality analyses of the war. Russian Life, citing Rosstat’s own records, reports that the agency has since stopped providing mortality data on request and that 385 federal datasets were pulled in 2024 alone.
The groups have not yet published the stolen material. Rosstat’s main website was still down when the first wave of reports went out on November 1.
