A DDoS attack on Russia’s food safety agency Rosselkhoznadzor disrupted food shipments by crippling its VetIS and Saturn tracking systems.
A DDoS cyberattack on Russia’s food safety agency, Rosselkhoznadzor, disrupted nationwide food shipments by knocking offline its VetIS and Saturn tracking systems for agricultural products and chemicals.
Rosselkhoznadzor (Россельхознадзор) is the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance of the Russian Federation. It’s a government agency under Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture.
The Russian agency excludes any data breaches. Megafon, Rostelecom, and Intelsk are working to mitigate the cyberattack by filtering malicious traffic.
“Rosselkhoznadzor informs that a large-scale targeted DDoS attack has been underway on Rosselkhoznadzor’s information systems since 8:40 a.m. on October 22, 2025. There is no threat to the integrity or confidentiality of the data processed in the systems.” the agency wrote on Telegram.
“Due to this, temporary unavailability of Rosselkhoznadzor’s information systems may occur depending on the geographic location or connection method.”
The DDoS attack hit the Agency’s Mercury platform, part of VetIS, halting food shipments nationwide. Major dairy and baby food producers reported hours-long delays as they couldn’t issue mandatory electronic veterinary certificates required for shipping meat, milk, and other animal products.
“Suppliers are currently trying to negotiate with retail chains for shipments without electronic accompanying documents” reported Russian website Shoppers. “The outage affected several retail chains, and they are currently setting up the Mercury system for emergency operation, says Stanislav Bogdanov, chairman of the presidium of the Association of Omnichannel Retail Companies (AKORT). It allows for the continuation of regular operations and product registration.”
Recorded Media states that Rosselkhoznadzor denied reports of lasting outages, saying the Mercury system was functioning normally. However, it’s unclear if the agency has full recovered the impacted system. This marks the fourth attack on Mercury in 2025; a June incident forced dairy producers to revert to paper certificates, disrupting supply chains. The dairy industry said retailers often refused products lacking electronic documents, while unclear regulatory guidance deepened confusion among suppliers.
“This was the service’s comment on information published in several media outlets that yesterday’s outage allegedly led to the shutdown of Mercury. Specifically, yesterday, they even managed to successfully process over 14.5 million veterinary accompanying documents electronically.” states the agency. “Had a more serious disruption occurred due to a hacker attack, this operation would have been impossible.”
At this time, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
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