Belarusian hacktivists admit to 2023 breach of Russian state healthcare network

What happened

In a statement on Friday, the Belarusian Cyber Partisans said they infiltrated the Moscow Department of Health in 2023 and obtained administrator-level access to its infrastructure, including systems connected to other government agencies. The Cyber Partisans' statement follows a report published last week by Russian cybersecurity firm Solar, a subsidiary of state-controlled telecom giant Rostelecom, which identified the group as the likely perpetrator of a long-running intrusion into an unnamed Russian healthcare organization.

Solar said it discovered the breach in December 2025 and traced the earliest signs of the intrusion to early 2024, suggesting the hackers may have remained inside the network for nearly two years. The Belarusian Cyber Partisans concurred with Russian research that they indeed spent months inside the network for the Moscow Department of Health.

The group said it spent months inside the network before abandoning the operation. A representative of the group also said it currently had access to hundreds of IT systems across Russia and Belarus, a claim that could not be independently verified.