Good News, Everyone.

For more than a decade, Russia’s so-called probiv market – a term derived from the verb “to pierce” or “to punch into a search bar” – 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.

While leaked databases exist everywhere, the scale and routine use of probiv is uniquely Russian. It grew out of the country’s deeply corrupt state infrastructure and became indispensable both to those seeking to exploit the system and to those trying to expose it.

But the Kremlin’s war on probiv appears to have had the opposite effect, Zakharov said. Many of the leading probiv operators and brokers have moved their businesses abroad where they are far less constrained by informal deals with the security services or fear of immediate arrest.

“Before, they still worked with the security services, or would think twice before releasing something extremely sensitive. Now all their brakes are off,” Zakharov said. “They’re dumping one sensitive leak after another.”