Yandex Code Repositories Leaked Allegedly by Former Employee

The threat actor has dumped a whopping 44.7 GB worth of Yandex data, including its source code repository, on a popular hacker forum.

Yandex Code Repositories

The source code repository of the Yandex search engine and technology giant was leaked as a torrent, containing over 1,900 factors for ranking search results. The company, also called Russian Google, had the data leaked on Brached Forums, a hacker forum that surfaced as an alternative to the popular and now-seized Raidforums.

Below Yandez code were exxposed:

Yandex search engine and indexing bot
Yandex Maps,
AI assistant “Alice”
Yandex Taxi, Yandex Travel
Ads service “Yandex Direct” and analytics service Metrika
Yandex 360: Virtual workspace including Mail, Disk, etc.
Yandex Market, Yandex Pay
Yandex Cloud

Former Yandex employee Grigory Bakunov, who is familiar with the leaked code, explained that the data leak’s motivation is political and that the rogue Yandex employee responsible for it had not attempted to sell the code to rivals.

According to him, because it does not include any customer data, the leak does not directly harm the privacy or security of Yandex users or pose a threat to proprietary technology.

Only code leaked from the repository. The lack of essential components, such as model weights for neural networks, makes it practically useless.

You can find a directory listing of the leaked files on GitHub.

However, Bakunov warned that the exposed code presents a chance for hackers to find security flaws and craft specialized exploits. It’s now just a matter of time, according to Bakunov.