According to analysis from different sources, Yandex source code does not contain user data, but it does contain over 1,900 factors for ranking search results and more.
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.
The incident should not come as a surprise, since Yandex or its products are often under cyber attack. In 2016, Hackread.com exclusively reported on how a dark web vendor was selling 6.3 million Yandex user account data.
In September 2021, the Russian search engine giant was hit by one of the largest DDoS attacks powered by 200,000 compromised IoT devices.
Data published by the threat actor (Image credit: Hackread.com) What was Leaked?
The leaker has shared a magnet link containing 44.7GB of files linked to Yandex git sources. The files were allegedly stolen from Yandex in July 2022. Apart from containing anti-spam guidelines, the code repositories are believed to have Yandex’s source code.
The leak revealed around 1,922 ranking factors the search engine uses in its search algorithm. The code was leaked as a torrent. Per the analysis posted by Twitter user Alex Buraks, the leaked data includes numerous ranking factors, including text relevancy, PageRank, content age, freshness, etc.
Moreover, several end-user behaviour factors, link-related factors, and host reliability exist.
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