The largest cyber heist since the 2015 hack of the US Department of Personnel Management (when 20+ million records of US federal employees got stolen) rocked Belarus sometimes in July of 2021.

The news of the data breach started to pop up on sites with a clear animosity of the Minsk government, headed by president Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, but later admitted by the local security organs, including the state security apparatus still called ‘KGB’  in Belarus.

The breach itself seems to be partly a complete dump of certain databases of the Internal Ministry, containing official entries of vehicle registration, passports addresses and a lot more. The real value of this dump is that these databases contain not only the data of ordinary citizens, but many cover identities, safe houses, false registry numbers, etc. as well, likely used by security and intelligence personnel.

Also, there are Terabytes of audio recordings from phone taps and eavesdropping coming from both the adversaries and the allies of the Minsk government.

And there are even stuff (if true, then actionnable intelligence) about Belarussian covert ops in the European Union and elsewhere.

While a cyber heist of such magnitude should make headlines internationally, so far even the allegedly contacted and seasoned Cold War vehicle Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty refrained from even mentioning the breach.

The breach so far is linked to hacktivism, with the so-called Belarus’ Cyberpartisans recognized as the group behind it.

Looking at the event from a different viewpoint it seems that the IDs of a nation as a whole is now out there somewhere – with all the well-known troubles associated with databases in the wrong hands that never stop duplicating…