A data processing center belonging to Russia’s Federal Tax Service (FNS) was attacked overnight on October 23 in Gorodets, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported.
Three people were injured in the attack on Gorodets. The Gorodets District administration said “drone debris” fell in the city, halting transportation temporarily.
Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, told Ekho Moskvy that the Federal Tax Service operates two duplicate data centers: one in Dubna, in the Moscow region, and another in the Nizhny Novgorod region. He said they store tax data, civil registry records, a registry of legal entities, and possibly cadastral information.
Klimarev believes that strikes on the Federal Tax Service’s data centers could “bring down the entire tax system.” “Imagine if information from, say, the land cadastre or the real estate registry were destroyed… and then try to prove that it’s your apartment,” he said.
Ukraine’s armed forces have attacked data centers belonging to Yandex three times since mid-October, as well as those of Sberbank and VK. Russia has also actively struck Ukrainian data centers.
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