Why the Belarus Railways Hack Marks a First for Ransomware

Now, in the geopolitically charged case of a hacktivist attack on the Belarusian railway system, those two veins of coercive hacking appear to be merging.On Monday, a group of Belarusian politically motivated hackers known as the Belarusian Cyber Partisans announced on Twitter and Telegram that they had breached the computer systems of Belarusian Railways, the country's national train system, as part of a hacktivist effort the attackers call Scorching Heat. We encrypted some of BR's servers, databases, and workstations to disrupt its operations,” the Cyber Partisan hackers wrote on Twitter Monday, noting that the hackers were careful not to affect “automation and security systems” that could cause dangerous railway conditions.Cybersecurity researchers have yet to independently confirm what sort of ransomware was used to encrypt Belarusian Railways' systems. [The Lukashenko regime] understands that everything they do, the decisions they make, the crimes they commit will be accounted.”Whether the Cyber Partisans' ransomware attack on Belarusian Railways will be a tactical success remains far from clear. It’s too early to say if Russia troops were affected, but we hope that it will indirectly make an impact on their movements.”In the larger view of hacktivism and ransomware, however, Guerrero-Saade argues that the Cyber Partisans' tactics could soon bleed out to other groups who see the power of ransomware to achieve political coercion—for good and for ill—and raise the stakes of Belarus' own political conflicts.