Hackers turn Belarusian president’s passport into NFT
The Belarusian hacktivist group Cyber Partisans claims to have stolen the passport details of all citizens of Belarus. Hackers turned the ID of the country’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko into an NFT.
Hacker group Belarusian Cyber Partisans said they are turning the details of the country’s president’s ID into a non-fungible token (NFT). The group announced their intentions via their Twitter and Telegram accounts. The announcement came on Lukashenko’s birthday.
“The dictator’s birthday is today – help us ruin it for him!” Get our artwork today. A special offer – a new Belarusian passport for Lukashenko where he is behind bars, hacktivists said.
The hacktivists shared details of other Belarusian government figures such as Lidia Yermoshina, former head of the country’s Central Election Commission, Natalia Eismant, press secretary to the president, and Ivan Tertel, deputy head of the Belarusian KGB.
Hacktivists uploaded the passport collection on OpeanSea, an NFT marketplace. However, the upload was terminated less than 24 hours after Cyber Partisans uploaded it to the platform. Hacktivists said they are looking for alternative outlets.
Cyber opposition
The cyber partisans have actively opposed the Lukashenko regime. The Belarusian president, called “the last dictator in Europe”, has been in power since 1994. The last presidential election in the country was held in 2020, and ended with a disputed victory for Lukashenko.
After countless reports of election fraud, almost half a million Belarusians took to the streets to protest the election results. Lukashenko used aggressive force to quell the protests, leading to many deaths and arrests of over 30,000 people.
Last year, the same hacker group said they had access to the entire ‘АИС Паспорт’ database, containing personal information about every Belarusian citizen, including passport photos, home address and place of work.
They also downloaded the past ten years of emergency call history, including those from people who reported their associates for opposing the regime.
And they hacked the entire police database, including CCTV footage and the work history of individual officers, as well as wiretapped telephone conversations of regime supporters and opponents.
The group has also expressed its support for Ukraine after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the county on February 24.
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