Yesterday, on January 25, on the specialized information resource, a user under the nickname borderline2023 posted in open access an archive of impressive size containing the source codes of many Yandex services, as well as files accompanying these services. This distribution consists of several archives in the .tar.bz2 format with names that can be used to identify belonging to a particular Yandex project – Maps, Market, and so on. In total, the hacker published 44.7 GB of files, but the company itself has already stated that there is nothing to worry about and no security breach has occurred.
Yandex employees officially confirmed to the Habr information resource that hackers had indeed leaked the source codes of the company’s projects to the network, but clarified that they were talking about publishing rather old versions of projects from Yandex’s internal repository. This statement seems quite plausible, because the hackers themselves said that they downloaded these source codes back in July 2022, that is, from the moment they were downloaded, the company could radically change each of the services and release dozens of patches and updates. However, although the company said that the data leaked to the network differs from the current versions of the service repositories, no one specifies how outdated they are.
Yandex employees also said that no hacking of the company’s services occurred – repositories are development tools within any company and are designed exclusively to work with different versions of the code. Accordingly, in these repositories, as well as in those leaked by hackers, personal information of users is not stored and nothing threatens them at the moment. However, the company is still conducting an internal investigation, because such an impressive amount of data can be obtained, including through social engineering, and not only by hacking the security system.
Source: Trash Box
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
