Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors! As the digital frontlines of the cyber conflict continue to expand, engagements are no longer isolated events. The campaign now stretches deep into Russia’s internal infrastructure. In a recent operation, the focus turned to the Komi Republic – an expansive and sparsely populated territory in the far north. The target was […]

The post CyberWar: Inside the Russian Government! first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

As the digital frontlines of the cyber conflict continue to expand, engagements are no longer isolated events. The campaign now stretches deep into Russia’s internal infrastructure. In a recent operation, the focus turned to the Komi Republic – an expansive and sparsely populated territory in the far north. The target was Avtodor Komi, a regional government-run entity charged with managing roads, bridges, and the logistics infrastructure that sustains mobility across this remote zone. This intrusion formed part of a wider campaign, extending from the occupied areas in Donbas through Russia’s heartland and reaching its remote fringes.

Avtodor Komi plays a central role in sustaining civil operations in the region. It oversees roads and bridge networks while managing raw material extraction, such as gravel and sand, critical to roadworks. The operations support industrial hubs like Syktyvkar, Vorkuta, and Ukhta. Interfering with institutions like this affects the administrative and operational capacity of an entire region.

Initial access was achieved via an overlooked API service that had been publicly accessible for years. A plugin in its back-end stack had not been patched, which created a critical entry point. With a crafted request, remote code execution was achieved. When a web shell was uploaded, the intrusion went quiet until nightfall. Then, by abusing a scheduled task running with elevated privileges, access to LSASS memory was gained. The credential dump had multiple accounts, including the domain administrator hash.

Antivirus software was not functioning on the system, which accelerated the attack. After confirming domain admin access, a simple persistence method was used by scheduling an implant and registering it in the antivirus exclusion list. This ensured the implant would remain untouched even if Microsoft Defender was later reactivated. Notably, many environments in Russia already maintain dangerously permissive exclusions, sometimes entire folders, often left behind by cracked software installers and unauthorized third-party activators.

The network itself reflected a mid-sized government deployment. Not all systems were domain-joined, many were configured independently, designed to meet the operational needs of scattered offices.

One of the compromised machines was a Hyper-V host operating multiple virtual machines. Generally, Hyper-V hosts are gems in pentests, since you can turn off the drives of virtual machines and investigate them. This access method is familiar to digital forensic students and has been used in previous incidents to compromise systems without authentication. In this case, several virtual machines were running the actual infrastructure, including Docker containers, a Russian “next-generation network security product” called FORPOST, and various other instances that formed the network.

Linux systems, if present, are prioritized for long-term access. They often lack any credible endpoint protection, and in environments like this, tools such as crontab provide robust persistence. Poor monitoring practices and the absence of centralized logging make it easy to remain undetected. Long-running cron jobs were implanted with obfuscated payloads and randomized execution time. Linux Basics for Hackers by OTW gives you a great understanding of how to establish persistence with crontab. If this part of the mission fails, you risk losing everything.

Once lateral movement was complete and privileges fully established, the objective shifted from access to disruption.

A legacy file server was identified as a high-value asset. It ran Windows 7 and stored five terabytes of data containing years of engineering documentation, email archives, maps, and other records. With NT AUTHORITY-level access, the system was wiped and overwritten beyond recovery.

Elsewhere on the subnet, a hardened surveillance server provided continuous feeds from construction sites. It also stored internal documentation and planning files. The operation was timed for early morning. When local staff arrived, all that remained was a black screen.

The virtual machines on the Hyper-V host came later. Each VM was deleted, snapshots were purged, and all data was rendered unrecoverable.

With the data layer neutralized, the network backbone became the next point of focus. Avtodor Komi’s offices relied heavily on MikroTik routers to manage internal and outbound communication. Most units retained default credentials, a recurring weakness. Firewall rules were stripped, new administrator accounts created, and external access was sliced. More than a half of the stations in the region were left with no internet connection. In a final touch, the default MikroTik banner replaced the company’s homepage.

By the time staff in Syktyvkar returned to work, the agency had ceased to function. Email was down. Communication between branch offices had collapsed. Navigation systems and maintenance dispatch tools were unusable. File repositories had been deleted, and backup paths had been either overwritten or sabotaged. Even GPS tracking details were useless.

Administrator accounts tied to recovery operations had been compromised and email accounts altered. Secondary verifications via mobile numbers were replaced with controlled data. Where backup services existed, they were either unreachable or had already been erased.

Conclusion

The compromise succeeded through predictable but still commonly unaddressed failures. An unpatched service offered the initial breach point. Poor segmentation, widespread credential reuse, and inactive antivirus software created a path through the network. Hyper-V gave access to multiple virtual systems, while neglected Linux boxes offered stable long-term persistence. What began as a simple oversight cascaded into full-scale destruction. The digital footprint of an entire government agency was wiped clean in one night. In war, infrastructure is the battleground. Here, the roads may remain, but the systems that support them are gone.

The post CyberWar: Inside the Russian Government! first appeared on Hackers Arise.

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