US imposes sanctions on Russia
WASHINGTON — Pushing back harder on Russia, the Trump administration accused Moscow on Thursday of a concerted hacking operation targeting the U.S. energy grid, aviation systems and other infrastructure, and also imposed sanctions on Russians for alleged interference in the 2016 election.
It was the strongest action to date against Russia by the administration, which has long been accused of being too soft on the Kremlin, and the first punishments for election meddling since President Donald Trump took office. The sanctions list included the 13 Russians indicted last month by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose Russia investigation the president has repeatedly sought to discredit.
U.S. national security officials said the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and intelligence agencies had determined that Russian intelligence and others were behind a broad range of cyberattacks beginning a year ago that have infiltrated the energy, nuclear, commercial, water, aviation and manufacturing sectors.
The officials said the Russian hackers chose their targets, obtained access to computer systems, conducted “network reconnaissance” of systems that control key elements of the U.S. economy and then attempted to cover their tracks by deleting evidence of their infiltration.
The U.S. government has helped the industries kick out the Russians from all systems currently known to have been penetrated, according to the officials, but the efforts continue. The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security information, left open the possibility of discovering more breaches, and said the federal government was issuing an alert to the energy industry to raise awareness about the threat and improve preparation.
That alert, published online by Homeland Security, said the hacking effort was a “multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities’ networks” to gain access and plant malware, which was then used to monitor activity as well as to move laterally into other, larger industrial control systems.
It also said the hackers exploited open-source material from companies’ public websites to mine seemingly innocuous information that was later used to infiltrate networks. In one case, the alert said, hackers downloaded a small image from a company’s human resources page that when blown up was actually “a high-resolution photo that displayed control systems equipment models and status information in the background.”
The accusations and accompanying Russian sanctions were the most severe yet by the Trump administration in connection with hacking and other efforts to sow discord in America’s democracy and compromise its infrastructure.
Also Thursday, President Donald Trump, who has been publicly skeptical of the election allegations, joined the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in a joint statement blaming Moscow for the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy who was living in England.
Reaction from Russia was swift.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was greeting the sanctions calmly, but he warned that Russia had already started “to prepare a response.” He suggested the Trump administration had timed the sanctions to come ahead of this weekend’s presidential election in Russia, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win an overwhelming victory.
“It is tied to U.S. internal disorder, tied of course to our electoral calendar,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency Tass.
The list of Russians now under U.S. sanctions includes the 13 indicted last month by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his Russia-related investigation into alleged election interference. The sanctions are the first use of the new powers that Congress passed last year to punish Moscow for meddling in an election that Trump won over Democrat Hillary Clinton.