Belarusian authorities have not commented on the claim, but the KGB website, which still uses the Soviet-era designation, was showing a blank page with a message saying it was “under maintenance” on Wednesday.

In a move that appeared to confirm the claim, the Belarusian Cyber-Partisans group published a list of the website’s administrators, its database and server logs on its Telegram channel.

The group’s coordinator, Yuliana Shemetovets, told the Associated Press in New York that the KGB hack “was a response” to the agency’s chief, Ivan Tertel, who this week publicly accused the group of planning attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure, including a nuclear power plant.

“The KGB is conducting the biggest political repressions in the history of our country and must answer for that. We work to save the lives of Belarusians and not to destroy them, as the repressive services of our country do,” Shemetovets said.

#belarus #kgb got hacked by @cpartisans. The KGB website is down for 2months. KGB database leaked on our tg channel https://t.co/64lo0JPf4i pic.twitter.com/gmWeXtj3Xr

— Belarusian Cyber-Partisans (@cpartisans) April 27, 2024

Last week, the Cyber-Partisans said they had hacked into the computers of the country’s largest fertilizer plant in a bid to pressure the government to release political prisoners.

The state-owned Grodno Azot has not commented on the claim, but its website has been unavailable since April 17.

Belarus, a close ally of Russia, has been rocked by mass protests since a disputed election in 2020 that handed authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term in a vote that the West and the opposition denounced as rigged.

The authorities have responded with a crackdown that has seen more than 35,000 people arrested, with many leading opposition figures jailed for lengthy terms and others forced to flee into exile.

The Cyber-Partisans have carried out a series of high-profile hacks of Belarusian state media in the past four years, and in 2022 they hacked the country’s railway system three times, taking control of its traffic lights and signalling systems and halting the transit of Russian military equipment to the front lines in Ukraine via Belarus.

See Also: South Korea accuses North Korean regime of cyber attacks on defense (Portuguese version)