“And now we can listen to them and understand their orders to commit crimes against people.” Azarau said the group hopes to use the information to pursue sanctions against Belarusian officials in the EU and the U.S. “We found that they were wiretapping the most famous law enforcement agents,” he said. “They hacked most of the main police database, and they downloaded all information, including information from the security service wiretapping department, the most secret department of our police.” The information from them is very important for us,” Azarau said. “We are cooperating closely with the Cyber Partisans. The recordings also offer audio evidence of police commanders ordering violence against protesters, he said. ![]() The wiretapped phone recordings obtained by the hackers revealed that Belarus’s interior ministry was spying on a wide range of people, including police officers-both senior and rank-and-file-as well as officials working with the prosecutor general, according to Azarau. Azarau said the information the hackers released is authentic and that BYPOL plans to use it to hold corrupt police and government officials accountable. He moved to Poland and joined BYPOL, which he said had been working with the Cyber Partisans since around late last year. Nikolai Kvantaliani, a Belarusian digital security expert, said the data exposed by the Cyber Partisans showed “that officials knew they were targeting innocent people and used extra force with no reason.” As a result, he said, “more people are starting to not believe in propaganda” from state media outlets, which suppressed images of police violence during anti-government demonstrations last year.Īliaksandr Azarau, a former police lieutenant colonel in Belarus who headed an organized crime and corruption unit, said he quit his job last year after witnessing election fraud and police violence. “If ever Lukashenko ends up facing prosecution in the International Criminal Court, for example, these records are going to be incredibly important,” said Tanya Lokot, an associate professor at Dublin City University who specializes in protest and digital rights issues in Eastern Europe. ![]() While the immediate impact of the hack isn’t entirely clear, experts said the long-term consequences could be significant, from undermining government proclamations to bolstering international efforts to sanction or prosecute Lukashenko and his subordinates. On July 30, the head of the country’s KGB security agency, Ivan Tertel, said in a speech aired on state television that there had been “hacker attacks on personal data” and a “systematic collection of information,” which he blamed on the work of “foreign special services,” according to local news website Zerkalo.io. ![]() In an interview and on social media, the hackers said they also sabotaged more than 240 surveillance cameras in Belarus and are preparing to shut down government computers with malicious software named X-App.īelarus’s interior ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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