Rosstatthe Russian federal statistics service (the equivalent of our Istat), confirmed that it had suffered a series of coordinated cyber attacks between 29 October and 1 November 2026. The agency, however, rejects the most alarming reconstructions: no compromised database, no leak of information protected by law, as stated to Kommersant.
Two collectives banned as “extremist” organizations in Russia claim responsibility for the attack: the Belarusians Cyber Partisans And Silent Crow. The same groups had already taken responsibility for the blocking of Aeroflot’s IT systems and the breach of a state real estate company with two billion stolen records in 2025.
According to the Cyber Partisans’ version, access to the Rosstat network dates back to around six months ago: a slow infiltration, designed to steal over 10TB of material without triggering alarms. Silent Crow instead claims a total loot of 23TBof which approximately 2TB coming from a restricted access area, with entrance on approximately 25,000 computers distributed between the agency’s headquarters and regional offices.
The statement released by the two groups talks about a completely compromised IT infrastructure: domain controllers, databases, virtualization servers, document flows, workstations, administrative consoles and VPNs. Among the systems declared destroyed were STATEK, CSOD, Demography, SED, ESSO, OFSN, the internal employee surveillance system, StatRegister and the agency’s websites, which remained inaccessible and replaced by defacing messages with the logos of the two collectives.
The question of military losses
The hacker groups have also released a graph that would indicate, in the last two years, between 25,000 and 50,000 losses per month among the Russian Armed Forces, with October 2026 just below the 50,000 mark. Caution should be used here: in Russian “??????” it is an umbrella term that includes killed, wounded, missing, captured and deserters, not a count of just the fallen. It is also yet to be clarified whether those numbers really come from Rosstat’s internal databases or are partly Ukrainian statistics published by the hackers themselves on the site that was made inaccessible: a distinction that significantly changes the evidentiary value of the leak.
Rosstat, it should be remembered, had already stopped publishing annual statistics on causes of death in 2024, making a sensitive issue for the Kremlin more opaque for some time.
As long as no independent third party can verify the authenticity of the stolen files, the comparison remains between the claims of the two collectives and the official reassurances from Moscow. In between, enormous numbers, even if we purify them of the inevitable exaggerations that accompany every data breach claimed by hacktivist groups.
