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Cyberattack Shuts Down 1,000+ Russian Pharmacies, Employees Sent Home
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Two of Moscow’s largest pharmacy chains, “Neopharm” and “Stolichki,” have suffered a cyberattack that halted operations across hundreds of outlets in the Russian capital and surrounding regions, as was reported by The Moscow Times on July 29.
According to company websites and local media, the incident disrupted cash registers, inventory systems, and loyalty program access, leaving pharmacies closed and staff temporarily dismissed.
“Apologies for the inconvenience. The unavailable functions will be restored shortly,” read a statement from “Stolichki,” which operates over 1,000 branches in 80 cities across central Russia.
Local outlet Mash reported on the same day that all “Stolichki” pharmacies in Moscow had closed, with employees told to stay home amid the system outage.
The disruption, attributed to a hacker breach, has crippled the network’s IT backbone, making medicine reservations and customer data services inaccessible.
Shot cited company representatives who described the issue as “scheduled maintenance,” though both outlets pointed to a cyberattack as the underlying cause.
According to internal sources operations could be restored within one to two days, no definitive timeline has been confirmed. The company press service has declined to provide further details.
The shutdown of the Neopharm and Stolichki pharmacy networks comes just a day after pro-Ukrainian hacker collective “IT Army of Ukraine” claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Russian national carrier “Aeroflot”, which caused widespread service disruptions on July 28 and continued into the first half of the day on July 29.
Earlier, it was reported that Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) launched a large‑scale cyberstrike on energy giant Gazprom, erasing backups, disabling operating systems on vital servers, and significantly disrupting services across nearly 390 subsidiaries.
