The complete tree of the source texts of the Git repository of the Russian company Yandex was made publicly available. The latter does not recognize the fact of hacking and states that 44.7 GB of data with a code was posted by one of the ex-employees, and they were allegedly stolen in July 2022. Be that as it may, the repository covers data until February 24, 2022, that is, at the time of the beginning of the russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Git repository itself contains the code and internal documentation of Yandex’s main services, such as search (frontend and backend), search bot, maps, mail, cloud platform, file storage, taxi, Alisa voice assistant, and others. The archive with the repository did not contain the data of the company’s users, and the code itself without internal tools is unlikely to fully reproduce at least some Yandex service. However, hackers can use it to find vulnerabilities in its services.

What is more interesting, the code shows that racism is tolerated in Yandex, as in russian society itself. As Canadian hacker Aubrey Cottle noticed, the code contains ethnic insults. In particular, you can find entire phrases using them.

In addition, Yandex code shows that the company has redesigned its child porn filter so that the search results do not show bad things about Putin. For example, if a person searches for “when will he die”, then Yandex replaces the query with “when he will die -(minus) Putin” so that results about the “leader” do not get into the output.

Image queries work similarly, if a user searches for the “z symbol,” the search adds a lot of negative clues to hide possible parallels with Nazi Germany.

But the funniest thing in this story is how Yandex users, russians, try to turn off the “smart” speaker with Alisa voice assistant. Basically, it is a variety of obscene language, threats to kill the virtual assistant, and accusations that it does not allow russians to go to the toilet. After all, as we already know, not all of them have toilets.