Russia blamed for hack attacks
The West unleashed an onslaught of new evidence and indictments yesterday accusing Russian military spies of hacking so widespread that it seemed to target anyone, anywhere who investigates Moscow’s involvement in an array of crimes — including doping, poisoning and the downing of a plane.
Russia defiantly denied the charges. Moscow lashed back with allegations that the Pentagon runs a clandestine US biological weapons program.
The nucleus of yesterday’s drama was Russia’s military intelligence agency – the GRU, increasingly the embodiment of Russian meddling abroad.
In the last 24 hours: US authorities charged seven officers from the GRU with hacking international agencies; British and Australian authorities accused the GRU of a devastating 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine, the email leaks that rocked the US 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 ham-handed attempted break-in — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed yesterday.
‘‘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,’’ US Defense Secretary James Mattis said..
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia said in a statement that the US is taking a ‘‘dangerous path’’ by ‘‘deliberately inciting tensions in relations between the nuclear powers,’’ adding that Washington’s European allies should also think about it.
Russia is already under EU and US sanctions, and dozens of GRU agents and alleged Russian trolls have already been indicted by the US but will likely never be face American justice.
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 US$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.
Later yesterday, Dutch defense officials released photos and a timeline of GRU agents’ botched attempt to break into the chemical weapons watchdog using Wi-fi hacking equipment hidden in a car parked outside a nearby hotel. The OPCW was investigating a nerve agent attack on a former GRU spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury, England, that Britain has blamed on the Russian government. Moscow vehemently denies involvement.
Photographs released by the Dutch Ministry of Defense showed a trunk loaded with a computer, battery, a bulky white transformer and a hidden antenna.
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 traveling on diplomatic passports.
The Dutch also accused the GRU of trying to hack investigators examining the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led team says it has strong evidence the missile that brought the plane down came from a Russia-based military unit. Russia has denied the charge.
Also yesterday, the US Justice Department charged seven GRU officers — including the four caught in The Hague — in an international hacking rampage that targeted more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company, a Swiss chemical lab and the OPCW.
The seven were identified as: Aleksei Morenets, 41; Evgenii Serebriakov, 37; Ivan Yermakov, 32; Artem Malyshev, 30; and Dmitriy Badin, 27; who were each assigned to Military Unit 26165, and Oleg Sotnikov, 46, and Alexey Minin, 46, who were also GRU officers.
Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said the accusations were fake and intended to ‘‘delegitimise’’ a resurgent Russia.
Russia countered with accusations of their own: The Defense Ministry unveiled complex allegations that the US has a clandestine biological weapons lab in the country of Georgia as part of a network of labs on the edges of Russia and China that flout international rules.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations ‘‘an invention’’ and ‘‘obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behaviour on many fronts.’’