They would have targeted in particular the French presidential and legislative elections of 2017 or the Olympic Games of 2018 in South Korea. The US Department of Justice announced Monday, October 19, that six Russian military intelligence officers have been indicted in the United States for global cyber attacks.
The agents “are accused of carrying out the most destructive and disruptive series of computer attacks ever attributed to a single group,” Deputy Minister John Demers, responsible for national security, told a press conference. These hackers, aged 27 to 35, are accused of having carried out their operations between 2015 and 2019 from an army building nicknamed “The Tower”, in Moscow, “for the strategic benefit of Russia”, according to the indictment adopted Thursday. According to this document, their first feat of arms was an attack on Ukraine’s electricity grid, which deprived the population of heating in the middle of winter.
Then, “the defendants supported a hacking and leaking operation in the days leading up to the 2017 French elections,” added John Demers. Between April and May, they carried out seven attacks that targeted more than 100 people, most of them members of Emmanuel Macron’s party, En Marche !, specifies the indictment. To do so, they included malware in attachments titled “Who can talk to journalists?” , Addressed to members of the campaign team from an address similar to that of the candidate’s spokesperson, according to the document. Thousands of internal documents from the future president’s team, mixed with fakes, were then disseminated on the Internet. At the time, the French justice had opened an investigation for “infringement of the secrecy of correspondence”.
“Unprecedented damage”
The six Russians, who are wanted by US authorities, are also believed to have carried out the global attack on the NotPetya malware. In June 2017, this “ransomware” had infected thousands of computers around the world, disrupting critical infrastructure, such as controls at the Chernobyl nuclear accident site and the ports of Bombay and Amsterdam. Among his victims were many U.S. entities – including a Pennsylvania hospital network – who lost nearly $ 1 billion, according to the indictment.
In 2018, they are suspected of having taken part in phishing campaigns against the Winter Olympics in South Korea, in which the Russian delegation, accused of doping, was unable to participate. Passing themselves off as North Korean hackers, they notably disrupted the opening ceremony of the Games. The computers of two organizations which investigated the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018 were also victims of these hackers.
They are not blamed for Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, said John Demers, even though one of them, Anatoly Kovalev, has already been indicted by another US court for intrusions into computers. officials responsible for organizing the poll. “No country uses its computer weapons in such a harmful and irresponsible manner as Russia, causing unprecedented damage to pursue small tactical advances and satisfy outbursts of anger,” the senior official said. At the same time, the British government accused Russian military intelligence services of continuing these attacks. According to the chief of diplomacy Dominic Raab, they carried out reconnaissance missions on the Internet against targets related to the Tokyo Olympics, postponed to 2021 by the pandemic.
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