An unfaithful employee leaked Yandex source code repositories

A source code repository allegedly stolen by a former employee of the Russian tech giant Yandex has been leaked online.

A Yandex source code repository allegedly stolen by a former employee of the Russian IT giant has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum.

The announcement published on BreachForums includes a magnet link to the alleged ‘Yandex git sources.’ The threat actor behind the post claims to have obtained 44.7 GB of files in July 2022, all the files are dated back to 24 February 2022 (the date of the Russian invasion of Ukraine). The threat actor claims the source code repositories contain the source code except the anti-spam rules.

The researchers Arseniy Shestakov published a detailed analysis of the leaked repository, which seems to contain the source code for all major services of Yandex, including:

• Search Engine and Indexing Bot
• Maps – Like Google Maps and Street View
• Alice – AI assistant like Siri / Alexa
• Taxi – Uber-like taxi service
• Direct – Ads service like Google Ads / Adwords
• Mail – Mail service like GMail
• Disk – File storage service like Google drive
• Market – Marketplace like Amazon
• Travel – Like a Booking.com plus Airplane, Train and Bus tickets
• Yandex360 – Like Google Workspaces for services on your own domain
• Cloud – Probably not all infrastructure code was leaked.
• Pay – Payment processing like Stripe, but with limited set of features
• Metrika – Like Google Analytics

“Since this is leak only contain contents of git repositories there is no personal data. There are at least some API keys, but they are likely only been used for testing deployment only.” wrote Shestakov.

Bleeping Computer contacted the Russian company, which in turn replied that its systems were not breached and that the repository was leaked by a former employee.

The company confirmed that is investigating the data leak, however, it pointed out that user data were not compromised and platform performance was not impacted.

The public availability of the git source code can allow threat actors to analyze it and find vulnerabilities that can be exploited in attacks against the Yandex services.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, data leak)

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