Indictments: Russian cyberattacks go beyond elections
WASHINGTON — Western allies accused Russian intelligence officers on Thursday of launching cyberattacks against organizations around the globe that challenged Russian wrongdoing, exposed Kremlin disinformation campaigns or took on President Vladimir Putin.
Officers operating near Red Square sought to hack the British Foreign Ministry, anti-doping agencies in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Canada, as well as investigators examining the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014, the officials said.
Other Russian officers armed with mobile computer equipment traveled to the Netherlands in April to tap into the headquarters of the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, which was investigating the poisoning in Britain a month earlier of a Russian former spy and his daughter. Those officers were caught and expelled.
Seeking to deter Moscow, officials in Washington, London and Amsterdam released extraordinarily detailed accounts of Russian misdeeds on Thursday in intelligence reports and a Justice Department indictment charging seven Russian officers. They named the officers, published photographs of them and their equipment, and released maps charting their travel and their targets. One officer caught in the Netherlands, they said, was carrying a receipt for a taxi ride to the Moscow airport from the street outside the headquarters of the military intelligence agency formerly known as the GRU.
The complaints echoed the case that British authorities recently made against Russia in the poisoning of the former spy, Sergei Skripal, by publishing photographs of two Russian officers and other evidence. U.S. officials also expanded the constellation of cyberattacks they blamed on Russia, which they had previously limited to election interference.
The accusations also demonstrated that even while its hacking of the Democratic National Committee was underway, the GRU was conducting similar operations around the world.
“The defendants believed that they could use their perceived anonymity to act with impunity, in their own countries and on territories of other sovereign nations, to undermine international institutions and to distract from their government’s own wrongdoing,” said John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security. “They were wrong.”
The Kremlin dismissed the accusations. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry called them the result of a “rich imagination” and “some kind of diabolical perfume cocktail,” Russian state media reported.
The combined effort by Western officials is based on a theory that Putin and his aides can be embarrassed into paring back their operations. But past cases cast doubt on that theory. U.S. intelligence agencies accused the Russians, and ultimately Putin, of the Democratic National Committee hack in 2016; Thursday’s allegations documented misconduct this year, by the same agency and, in some cases, the same operatives.
Of the seven Russian officers charged by the Justice Department, three were also indicted in July by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, for interfering in the 2016 election. The new Justice Department case did not emerge from the Mueller investigation, Demers said, but added, “They evince the same methods of computer intrusion and the same overarching Russian strategic goal: to pursue its interests through illegal influence and disinformation operations aimed at muddying or altering perceptions of the truth.”
The indictment primarily focused on allegations that the Russian officers hacked into antidoping agencies and sporting federations, including the global soccer organization FIFA, and stole private medical information about roughly 250 athletes from 30 countries.