A major Siberian internet provider, Russia’s Orion Telecom, has suffered losses of more than 66 million rubles ($839,000) following a cyber operation carried out by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR), sources within the agency told the Kyiv Post.
[Note: The Orion Telecom named in this article is a Russian company that is not connectd in any way with Orion Telecom Networks Inc., an Arizona-based American-owned international corporation, which has no business or other interests in the Russian Federation, icluding Siberia. – Ed.]
According to HUR, the information came from a complaint Orion Telecom filed with Russian police after the incident.
The company reportedly acknowledged financial losses totaling 66 million rubles and confirmed that users’ personal data had been leaked as a result of the Ukrainian operation.
The provider has requested that Russian authorities open a criminal case. Under Russian law, Orion Telecom could also face an additional fine of up to 15 million rubles for allowing the data breach.
HUR cyber specialists first targeted Orion Telecom’s infrastructure earlier this summer, on June 12, the rogue state’s annual Russia Day.
The operation paralyzed the provider’s systems, leaving several regions without internet or television access.
Among the affected areas was a closed city specializing in uranium mining, where Orion Telecom was the only service provider.
That morning, social media pages in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Bratsk, and Abakan were flooded with complaints from residents reporting connectivity outages.
Ukraine’s military intelligence noted that Russia’s Orion Telecom networks had been actively used by Russian security agencies to support military operations against Ukraine.
The latest strike is part of a broader campaign by HUR to disrupt Russian digital infrastructure.
On Sept. 25, HUR launched a large-scale cyberattack that crippled Russia’s System of Fast Payments (SBP) – a platform widely used for instant money transfers, including donations to organizations supporting Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
According to Kyiv Post sources in HUR, the attack, which took the form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, also targeted the major internet provider TransTeleCom.
The disruption left many Russians unable to complete online payments or routine transactions, with residents in Yekaterinburg reporting failures in paying for public transportation and fuel purchases.
On Sept.24, HUR said its cyber specialists have also breached the servers of Moscow-installed authorities in occupied Crimea for the second time in recent months, obtaining over 100 terabytes of sensitive data.
A HUR source told Kyiv Post that the hacked files include official correspondence by the Russia-installed head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, as well as internal communications between ministries and agencies of the occupation government.
Another earlier operation targeted Russian systems during nationwide voting on Sept. 14, including those in other occupied Ukrainian territories.
During the attack, HUR cyber specialists paralyzed the digital resources of Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC), preventing many Russians from casting ballots in gubernatorial and mayoral races.
The attack also targeted the servers of the CEC’s remote e-voting platform, backbone routers of the state-owned telecom provider Rostelecom, and servers of the Gosuslugi government services portal