‘All brakes are off’: Russia’s attempt to rein in illicit market for leaked data backfires

Russia is scrambling to rein in the country’s sprawling illicit market for leaked personal data, a shadowy ecosystem long exploited by investigative journalists, police and criminal groups. The late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.Probivwas used to trace the FSB state security unit behind his poisoning.Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP For more than a decade, Russia’s so-called probiv market - a term derived from the verb “to pierce” or “to punch into a search bar” - has operated as a parallel information economy built on a network of corrupt officials, traffic police, bank employees and low-level security staff willing to sell access to restricted government or corporate databases. While leaked databases exist everywhere, the scale and routine use of probiv is uniquely Russian. It grew out of the country’s deeply corrupt state infrastructure and became indispensable both to those seeking to exploit the system and to those trying to expose it. For a modest fee - sometimes as little as $10 - buyers can obtain passport numbers, home addresses, travel histories, car registrations and internal police records. At the higher end, entire dossiers could be purchased on individuals, including metadata on calls and movements. Probiv , whose use remains controversial among Russian journalists, have underpinned high-profile investigations , including tracing the FSB state security unit behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. It also served the police and security services themselves, who routinely used the black market to track activists, opposition figures and anyone who fell outside the state’s favour. “It is one of the paradoxes of modern Russia: on the one hand, these services are illegal and rely on leaked data, yet on the other, they are far more convenient for day-to-day police work than the multitude of official departmental databases,” said Andrei Zakharov, an investigative journalist who recently published a book on probiv . But as the war in Ukraine stretched into its fourth year, the Kremlin began to view probiv less as a tolerated convenience and more as a threat. Phone scam syndicates were using leaked data on an industrial scale, while Ukrainian intelligence had learned to exploit the country’s porous information landscape to identify and assassinate military officials inside Russia. During his annual phone-in with the nation last year, President Vladimir Putin himself admitted that a close friend had fallen victim to a phone scam. That incident, said Zakharov, was the signal for security services to start closing down on the probiv market. Over the past year, Putin has signed laws tightening penalties for data leaks, imposing up to 10 years in prison for accessing or distributing such information. The security services have also begun an aggressive hunt for probiv operators, detaining several brokers and targeting the infrastructure they rely on. Among the most high-profile arrests was of the team behind Usersbox, one of the widest-used and cheapest services. But the Kremlin’s war on probiv appears to have had the opposite effect, Zakharov said. Many of the leading probiv operators and brokers have moved their businesses abroad where they are...

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