OUTRAGEOUS RUSSIAN HACKERS OUTED BY THE WEST.
NATO allies, including Canada, on Thursday blamed the Russian military for new cyberattacks that targeted the international chemical weapons agency and the investigation into the mysterious 2014 crash of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. A wealth of surveillance footage released by Western intelligence agencies was quickly and overwhelmingly confirmed by independent reporting.
THE ACCUSED HACKERS
The nucleus of Thursday’s drama was Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, increasingly the embodiment of Russian meddling abroad.
In the past 24 hours: U.S. authorities charged seven officers from the GRU with hacking international agencies between 2014 and 2018; British and Australian authorities accused the GRU of a devastating 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine, the email leaks that rocked the U.S. 2016 election and other damaging hacks; and Dutch officials alleged that GRU agents tried and failed to hack into the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
THE TARGETS
The litany of accusations of GRU malfeasance began overnight, when British and Australian authorities accused the Russian agency of being behind the catastrophic 2017 cyberattack in Ukraine. The malicious software outbreak knocked out ATMS, gas stations, pharmacies and hospitals and, according to a secret White House assessment recently cited by Wired, caused $10 billion in damage worldwide.
The British and Australians also linked the GRU to other hacks, including the Democratic party email leaks and online cyber propaganda that sowed havoc before Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election.
THE AMATEURS
The ham-handed attempted break-in of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed Thursday. It was so obvious, in fact, that it almost looked like the Russians didn’t care about getting caught.
In April, four men, travelling under the names Aleksei Morenets, Evgenni Serebriakov, Oleg Sotnikov and Aleksey Minin, flew to the Netherlands from Moscow and attempted to hack into the Wi-fi at the OPCW from a rental car parked outside its headquarters in The Hague.
At the time, the OPCW was analyzing samples of the nerve agent used to poison an ex-russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury to assess the U.K.’S claim that Novichok was used.
Photographs released by the Dutch Ministry of Defence
showed a trunk loaded with a computer, battery, a bulky white transformer and a hidden antenna; officials said the equipment was operational when Dutch counterintelligence interrupted the operation.
What Dutch authorities found seemed to be the work of an amateur. A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
The men were expelled instead of arrested, because they were travelling on diplomatic passports.
THE INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE
Security services said a laptop seized from the men in the parking lot of the OPCW showed attempts to hack the investigation in Malaysia into the downing of Flight MH17. A Russia-based military unit is suspected of causing the crash in eastern Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board the Malaysian Airlines jetliner.
The laptop also showed evidence of trying to infiltrate the World Anti-doping Agency probe targeting Russian athletes and the Swiss lab that was analyzing samples of the nerve agent used in the Salisbury poisoning.
The World Anti-doping Agency, the U.S. Anti-doping Agency and the Canadian anti-doping agency were all identified by the U.S. indictment against the Russians.
THE RESPONSE
“Basically, the Russians got caught with their equipment, people who were doing it, and they have got to pay the piper. They are going to have to be held to account,” U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis said in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO allies. Mattis said the West has “a wide variety of responses” available.
However, Russia is already under EU and U.S. sanctions, and dozens of GRU agents and alleged Russian trolls have already been indicted by the U.S but will likely never be handed over to face American justice.
It may well be that shining a cold hard light on their nefarious activities is all the punishment the West can mete out.
Calling Russia a “pariah state,” British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said: “Where Russia acts in an indiscriminate and reckless way, where they have done in terms of these cyberattacks, we will be exposing them.”