The French newspaper Le Monde said that files hacked and analyzed reveal many facts within the system built by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a unique criminal enterprise.
There is a company in Russia where mercenaries of war criminals, lawyers, armed thugs, experienced computer scientists and political scientists, all in the service of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former convict who became "Putin's cook," a general without military insignia in the Ukraine war and chairman of the Wagner Group, which includes tens of thousands of elements, work side by side.
According to the newspaper, a group of investigators funded by Russian businessman and dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky hacked the company on March 18, 2023 and published a study entitled "Prigozhin's Cyber Army", in which it was based on more than a million internal documents seized by a group of anonymous hackers, copied from the Internet Research Agency and the Concorde Group, as well as the Wagner Group, and 400 real or fake millionaire companies.
Interrogation from two hours ago
When viewed from the inside, this commercial structure reveals a quasi-state, as well as a unique criminal enterprise whose activities are all "organically linked", so that employees can be transferred from one corner of the empire very quickly to another sector, and lawyers and financiers examine franchise contracts in St. Petersburg, Antananarivo or Bangui, in a multiform structural structure, which complicates the implementation of international sanctions.
According to the newspaper, the businessman subjects all candidates of his sprawling group to a mandatory two-hour questioning by means of a polygraph, in order to filter out anyone who has even weak tendencies to the opposition or has any contact with the media and police, to isolate drug addicts and those with debts, as well as to determine the candidate's opinion on the Ukraine war.
The study pointed to a paradox that shows a "strange imbalance" between the company's utmost security and culture of secrecy on the one hand, and complete indifference to digital data security on the other, so that employees do not receive any training or instructions regarding encryption.