DOJ: Olympics targeted in Russian hack
WASHINGTON » Six current and former Russian military officers sought to disrupt through computer hacking the French election, the Winter Olympics and U.S. hospitals and businesses, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed Monday. It details destructive attacks on a broad range of targets and implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U. S. election.
The indictment accuses the defendants, all said to be officers in the Russian military agency known as the GRU, in hacks that prosecutors say were aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests and as retribution against its perceived enemies.
They include attacks against Ukraine’s power grid; a hack-and-leak operation directed at the political party of French President Emmanuel Macron in the days leading up to the 2017 election; efforts to punish Olympics organizers who had banned Russian athletes for doping, and to impede an investigation into the suspected nerve- agent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter.
The indictment does not charge the defendants in connection with interference in American elections, though the officers are part of the same military intelligence unit that prosecutors say interfered in the 2016 U. S. presidential election by hacking
Democratic email accounts. One of the six charged in the case announced Monday was among the Russian military intelligence officers charged with hacking in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.
The 50-page indictment, filed in federal court in Pittsburgh, also accuses the hackers of destroying malicious software in 2017 that crippled computers around the globe, including at a Pennsylvania hospital and a pharmaceutical company. The criminal conspiracy alleged by the Justice
Department enables prosecutors to include allegations for victims that are not based in the U. S.
None of the six defendants is currently in custody, but the Justice Department in recent years has eagerly charged foreign hacker in absentia with the goal of creating a message of deterrence.
“No country has weaponized its cyber capabilities as maliciously and irresponsibly as Russia, wantonly causing unprecedented collateral damage to pursue small tactical advantages as fits of spite,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said at a news conference announcing the case.