7 ‘dopey’ Russians charged
Face US hack raps
Seven Russian intelligence officers have been charged in the United States with carrying out an international hacking campaign on agencies and organizations that were probing Moscow’s sports-doping program and the poisoning of a former KGB agent in Britain, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
Members of the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence agency, waged a cybercampaign to steal information from 2014 through May of this year, according to a 41-page indictment filed in western Pennsylvania federal court.
Among the targets were 40 antidoping agencies and sport organizations around the world and in the US that backed a ban on Russian athletes in international sporting events and that publicly condemned the country’s state-run athletedoping program.
The officers also allegedly targeted the Pittsburghbased Westinghouse Electric Corp., which supplies nuclear fuel to Ukraine; the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria; and a Swiss lab that was testing the military-grade nerve-gas used in the attack of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England this past March.
After pilfering sensitive information about athletes — including their names, medical information and drug-testing history — the data was posted online via a hacktivist group called Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.
The stolen data involved records of “nearly 250 athletes from almost 30 countries,” the indictment said.
“All of this was done to undermine those organizations’ efforts to ensure the integrity of the Olympic and other games,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said.
The seven officers, who are all based in Russia, were charged with computer hacking, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money-laundering.
The charges aren’t directly related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, although three of the seven had been indicted in July by his prosecutors for allegedly hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US election.