In late January an anonymous group of Belarusian hackers compromised the country’s railway system, claiming it had encrypted some of the state train authority’s databases and destroyed its archives. The group, which calls itself the “Cyberpartisans'' says it attacked Belarusian Railway because its tracks are being used to transport Russian soldiers and equipment inside Belarus, near the border with Ukraine. 

The Belarusian Railway online ticketing system was temporarily down on the day of the hack, but further consequences are not clear.

“Even Belarusian Railway itself can’t tell the full impact of the attack yet,” said an anonymous representative of the group. “Most of the databases are still not working. We attacked the business intelligence and analytics system so they don’t have the data to fully quantify their losses.” 

Last year, the group released troves of tapped phone calls and internal documents from police and interior ministry databases, providing evidence of a brutal police crackdown on protesters following the country’s disputed election in August 2020.