<\/p>\n
Russia is scrambling to rein in the country\u2019s sprawling illicit market for leaked personal data, a shadowy ecosystem long exploited by investigative journalists, police and criminal groups.<\/p>\n
For more than a decade, Russia\u2019s so-called probiv<\/em> market \u2013 a term derived from the verb \u201cto pierce\u201d or \u201cto punch into a search bar\u201d \u2013 has operated as a parallel information economy built on a network of corrupt officials, traffic police, bank employees and low-level security staff willing to sell access to restricted government or corporate databases.<\/p>\n While leaked databases exist everywhere, the scale and routine use of probiv<\/em> is uniquely Russian. It grew out of the country\u2019s deeply corrupt state infrastructure and became indispensable both to those seeking to exploit the system and to those trying to expose it.<\/p>\n For a modest fee \u2013 sometimes as little as $10 \u2013 buyers can obtain passport numbers, home addresses, travel histories, car registrations and internal police records. At the higher end, entire dossiers could be purchased on individuals, including metadata on calls and movements.<\/p>\n Probiv<\/em>, whose use remains controversial among Russian journalists, have underpinned high-profile investigations<\/a>, including tracing the FSB state security unit behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.<\/p>\n It also served the police and security services themselves, who routinely used the black market to track activists, opposition figures and anyone who fell outside the state\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is one of the paradoxes of modern Russia: on the one hand, these services are illegal and rely on leaked data, yet on the other, they are far more convenient for day-to-day police work than the multitude of official departmental databases,\u201d said Andrei Zakharov, an investigative journalist who recently published a book on <\/a>probiv<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n But as the war in Ukraine<\/a> stretched into its fourth year, the Kremlin began to view probiv<\/em> less as a tolerated convenience and more as a threat.<\/p>\n