Cyber Criminals in the Kremlin Putin’s spies are exposed in cases around the world.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-criminals-in-the-kremlin-1538685869
Several governments on Thursday made a coordinated release of new information about Russian cyber espionage, including an indictment of seven Russian intelligence agents from the Department of Justice in Washington. Authorities are performing a public service by lifting the veil of secrecy that usually envelops counterintelligence.
The Justice indictment names seven agents in the Kremlin’s intelligence agency, the GRU, for hacking attacks against sports antidoping agencies and Westinghouse Electric Co. As payback for investigations into Russian athletes’ use of banned performance-enhancing drugs, the GRU stole online data about hundreds of other athletes—even sending agents to Rio de Janeiro to hack the computers of antidoping officials at a conference. Then it leaked confidential information to embarrass innocent sportsmen and women.
Meanwhile, the Dutch government says four Russian agents showed up in April intending to hack the wireless network at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague. The plan appears to have been to place sophisticated equipment in a rental car and then park outside the building with the trunk pointed toward the offices to pick up wireless computer transmissions.
The OPCW at the time was investigating the Kremlin’s use of a nerve agent to try to assassinate a Russian double agent in the U.K.—an attack that killed an innocent civilian. The agency also was investigating the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s client regime in Syria.
There’s evidence that the spies would have headed to an OPCW-affiliated lab in Switzerland if the Dutch hadn’t nabbed them. The British government says the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Porton Down military lab also were targets of failed Russian cyberattacks at about the same time.
Authorities linked some of the equipment to Malaysia, suggesting the Russians may be related to an earlier attempt to hack computers used in the investigation of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 by Russian proxies in Ukraine. Clearly the Kremlin is curious about what other governments know about the Kremlin’s criminal activities.
Governments are right to expose all this, despite longstanding and often reasonable aversion to casting too much public light on counterintelligence. The technical complexity of cybercrime too often gives rogue leaders such as Vladimir Putin room to hide, and offers sympathetic politicians in the West scope to obscure or excuse.
Thursday’s coordinated reveal is part of a growing willingness of Western governments to inform citizens about the true scale of the cyber threat, and it’s important for voters to know. Mr. Putin is beyond embarrassment, but he’s not beyond exposure.
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