Pro-Ukrainian hackers claim they breached Russia’s national payment system

The hackers also claim they accessed user data and defacing the National Payment Card System’s website.
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Members of the DumpForums group and the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance have declared that they vandalised a website belonging to the National Payment Card System (NSPK), a government-run entity. They claim to have also breached the internal systems of Mir, a consumer payment network that operates under the NSPK, and accessed user data. Mir translates to ‘world’ in Russian and is a domestic alternative to international payment card brands such as Visa and Mastercard.

The NSPK has acknowledged the cyberattack on its website, which the intruders defaced. A message left on the compromised site stated that this new version of NSPK’s website was created in exchange for the personal data of its users.

However, the NSPK has vehemently denied data leakage due to the breach. Speaking to the Russian news agency Tass, a spokesperson for the NSPK explained that the website is developed and maintained by a third-party contractor and neither stores confidential information nor has any connection to the payment infrastructure. The spokesperson asserted that accessing systems through the website is impossible, emphasising that the company’s servers and data centres lack internet access.

While the agency did not specifically address the claim made by the hackers regarding their access to Mir’s internal systems, it stated that the attacks had no impact on financial transactions and payments.

At the time of this publication, NSPK had not responded to requests for further comment. Their website remained inaccessible mid-morning on a Tuesday, Eastern US time.

In response to NSPK’s statements, DumpForums shared a screenshot allegedly showing a folder containing 30 gigabytes of Mir data.

Mir was introduced in 2014, coinciding with Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Its purpose was to mitigate potential disruptions in electronic payments due to sanctions imposed on several Russian banks. While Mir payment cards are not widely accepted outside of Russia, they gained popularity within the country following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the withdrawal of international payment services from Russia, now accounting for nearly 50% of payments within Russia.