US, allies accuse Russians of wide-ranging cybercrimes
WASHINGTON — Painting a portrait of Russian cybercrimes spanning the globe, the Justice Department on Thursday charged seven Russian intelligence officers with targeting an international chemical-weapons watchdog agency, a nuclear energy company in Pennsylvania and the keepers of Olympic athletes’ drugtesting data.
Moscow scoffed at the charges, which came hours after British, Dutch and Australian officials alleged a similarly wide-ranging pattern of “brazen” conduct by Russia’s GRU military spy agency. They cited dozens of cyber intrusions, including the hacking and online propaganda intended to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Other alleged acts included Russian hacking or attempted hacking of the investigations of the downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and probes of the attempted assassination in March of a turncoat Russian spy in Britain with a nerve agent.
The seven charged in the U.S. indictment are all Russian citizens. Four are GRU agents who were previously expelled from the Netherlands. It is unlikely they will ever appear in a U.S. courtroom.
Still, the volume of accusations — backed by digital fingerprints and on-the-ground surveillance of alleged Russian spy teams — represents a concerted Western effort to confront Moscow over its systemic hacking and other clandestine aggression.
The evidence is awkward for President Donald Trump, who has consistently sought to downplay Russian involvement in the U.S. election. He has repeatedly said “others” could be responsible as well.
U.S. officials said the indictment shows that the Kremlin thought — wrongly — that it could easily cover its digital tracks.
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 to distract from their government’s own malfeasance,” said John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry mocked the West’s “spy mania.”
Britain and Moscow had sparred for months over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence operative who has lived in Britain since he was handed over in a spy swap. British authorities recently unveiled surveillance video of two men they said had poisoned Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
The pair, said to be GRU officers, were swiftly identified. They later appeared on Russian TV and denied the charges.
U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who was meeting NATO allies in Brussels as the allegations were unspooling in Western capitals, said, “Basically, the Russians got caught with their equipment, people who were doing it, and they have got to pay the piper.” He did not say what retaliatory steps might be taken.
The indictment describes a striking array of spycraft methods used by the Russian agents — fictitious personas, proxy servers, spear-phishing emails and malware commandand-control servers.
Some of the most comprehensive details came from the Netherlands, where officials provided photos and a precise timeline of Russian agents’ efforts to target the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague.