On January 28, Zavodski district court of Minsk passed guilty verdicts in the case of four citizens who stood trial for the hacking of the computer systems of Minsk city executive committee. The four defendants have been behind bars for 18 months.
At the very beginning of the hearing, judge Zhanna Khvoynitskaya ordered the trial be held behind closed doors, as the case file allegedly contained ‘highly sensitive information’.
Kim Samusenka, Alyaksei Samusenka, Pavel Drozd, Ivan Andrushoyts were charged under six articles of the Criminal Code:
According to the autjorities’ version, when being on the technical floor of the building on Prytytski Street in Minsk in November 2020, ‘made unauthorised access to information stored in the computer network of Minsk City Executive Committee with the help of computer equipment’. The man allegedly seized recordings of video surveillance cameras installed in the capital city and published them on Internet resources.
In addition, the prosecution side claims that the defendant gained access to computer systems of Minsk City Executive Committee, which led to the disruption of the work of enterprises and government agencies; they copied and deleted files of various formats and inserted false information in advance instead, they say.
As a result, brothers Kim and Alyaksei Samusenka have been sentenced to 6.5 and 4 years in prison, respectively. Pavel Drozd and Ivan Andrushoyts have got 3.5 years of imprisonment each.