Russian hackers sent threats to 5 Americans
Group posed as militants, targeted U.S. military wives
PARIS — Army wife Angela Ricketts was soaking in a bubble bath in her Colorado home, leafing through a memoir, when a message appeared on her iPhone:
“Dear Angela!” it said. “Bloody Valentine’s Day!”
“We know everything about you, your husband and your children,” the Facebook message continued, claiming that the hackers operating under the flag of Islamic State militants had penetrated her computer and her phone. “We’re much closer than you can even imagine.”
Ricketts was one of five military wives who received death threats from the self-styled CyberCaliphate on the morning of Feb. 10, 2015. The warnings led to days of anguished media coverage of Islamic State militants’ online reach.
Except it wasn’t militants from the Islamic State, also called ISIS.
The Associated Press has found evidence that the women were targeted not by jihadis but by the same Russian hacking group that intervened in the election and exposed the emails of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.
The operation parallels the online disinformation campaign by Russian trolls in the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
Links between CyberCaliphate and the Russian hackers — typically nicknamed Fancy Bear or APT28 — have been documented previously. On both sides of the Atlantic, the consensus is that the two groups are closely related.
But that consensus never filtered through to the women involved, many of whom were convinced they had been targeted by ISIS sympathizers up until AP contacted them.
As Ricketts scrambled out of the tub to show the threat to her husband, nearly identical messages reached Lori Volkman, a deputy prosecutor based in Oregon who had won fame as a blogger after her husband deployed to the Middle East; Ashley BroadwayMack, based in the Washington, D.C., area and head of an association for gay and lesbian military family members; and Amy Bushatz, an Alaska-based journalist who covers spouse and family issues for Military.com.
Liz Snell, the wife of a Marine, was at her husband’s retirement ceremony in California when her phone rang. The Twitter account of her charity, Military Spouses of Strength, had been hacked. It was broadcasting threats not only to herself and the other spouses, but also to their families and then-first lady Michelle Obama.
Snell flew home to Michigan from the ceremony, took her children and checked into a Comfort Inn for two nights. “Any time somebody threatens your family, Mama Bear comes out,” she said.
The five women were also all quoted in a CNN piece about the hacking of a military Twitter feed by CyberCaliphate a few weeks earlier. In it, they had struck a defiant tone. After they received the threats, they suspected that CyberCaliphate singled them out for retaliation.
The women refused to be intimidated.