Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) denied earlier reports that its services had been hacked and that a large amount of data had been deleted, stating that the attack on its network has been dealt with.
“Now lots of federal agencies, many companies, both affiliated with the government and not, suffer from large numbers of DDoS attacks. We are not an exception. We have to work on repelling them. The last attack was repelled as well,” Alexander Neradko, the head of Rosaviatsiya, said in an interview to Russian news website MK.ru.
Neradko also said that work at the agency has continued uninterrupted.
The statement follows reports of an unprecedented attack that took down Rosaviatsiya’s servers on March 26, 2022.
The attack, which was attributed to the hacker group Anonymous, reportedly erased 65 terabytes of data containing Rosaviatsiya’s documents, files and emails. Anonymous has not confirmed the allegations.
According to The Aviation Herald, there were no backups of alleged deleted data.
On March 28, an internal memo surfaced stating that Roasviatsiya is transitioning to paper documents instead of using digital files while the agency’s entire communications network is down.
At the time of publication on March 30, 2022, Rosaviatsiya’s website remained offline.
Additionally, there have been reports of large-scale corruption at Rosaviatsiya, indicating that the Russian government is looking to replace Neradko who allegedly oversaw illegal schemes conducted by the agency’s management.