Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) has gained access to sensitive data of Russia’s strategic aircraft manufacturer Tupolev, a source in HUR told the Kyiv Independent on June 4.
Tupolev, a Soviet-era aerospace firm now fully integrated into Russia’s defense-industrial complex, has been under international sanctions since 2022 for its role in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Its bombers have been widely used to launch long-range cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.
According to the source, HUR’s cyber corps accessed over 4.4 gigabytes (GB) of internal data, including official correspondence, personnel files, home addresses, resumes, purchase records, and closed meeting minutes.
There is a comment in the Reddit thread linked by the other user that sums it up nicely. Ukraine was the California of the Soviet Union. Sevastopol was San Diego and Ukraine housed a lot of the top universities and aerospace engineering in the Soviet Union. Think Stanford and NASA’s JPL in California. In great part, those scary planes, missiles and submarines could be traced back to Ukraine.
(All of this is an oversimplification, of course)