Simon Willison’s Weblog

26th April 2024

Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents. This story is from April 2022 but I realize now I never linked to it.

Yandex Food, a popular food delivery service in Russia, suffered a major data leak.

The data included an order history with names, addresses and phone numbers of people who had placed food orders through that service.

Bellingcat were able to cross-reference this leak with addresses of Russian security service buildings—including those linked to the GRU and FSB.This allowed them to identify the names and phone numbers of people working for those organizations, and then combine that information with further leaked data as part of their other investigations.

If you look closely at the screenshots in this story they may look familiar: Bellingcat were using Datasette internally as a tool for exploring this data!