US charges six Russian military officers linked to some of the world’s major cyber attacks
20 October, 2020
US authorities on Monday charged six Russian military officers regarding a few of the world’s major cyberattacks during the past decade.
The US Department of Justice revealed the charges against the six officers from Russia’s main intelligence directorate GRU and said they were members of a superior state-sponsored Russian secret hacking group called Sandworm.
These charges will be the first against Sandworm.
They include computer fraud and conspiracy in launching attacks that entailed taking down Ukraine's power grid in 2015, an effort to disrupt the French elections in 2016 and an attack on the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018.
The officers are aged in their twenties and thirties and were discovered as Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko, Sergey Vladimirovich Detistov, Pavel Valeryevich Frolov, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Artem Valeryevich Ochichenko, and Petr Nikolayevich Pliskin
US officials described Russian cybercrime as malicious and irresponsible.
“No country has weaponized its cyber capacities as maliciously or irresponsibly as Russia, wantonly causing unprecedented harm to pursue small tactical advantages and to fulfill fits of spite,” assistant lawyer general John Demers said.
The FBI was also involved in the case.
“The FBI has repeatedly warned that Russia is an extremely capable cyber adversary, and the information revealed in this indictment illustrates how pervasive and destructive Russia’s cyber activities truly are,” FBI deputy director David Bowdich said.
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: “The GRU’s actions against the Olympic and Paralympic Games are cynical and reckless. We condemn them in the strongest possible terms.
“The UK will work with our allies to call out and counter future malicious cyber attacks.”
Other cyber attacks the group carried out in the last five years were against worldwide businesses and critical infrastructure (using the NotPetya malware), Novichok poisoning investigations, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and Georgian companies and government entities.
The NotPetya attack was on major companies such as for example Fedex and Maersk.
In some cases it had been aimed at medical centres, shutting down computers at two hospitals in Pennsylvania, and blocking patients’ usage of medical systems, the Justice Department said.
Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko was charged for helping to develop NotPetya.
Source: www.thenationalnews.com