[IsraelTimes] Justice Department accuses GRU officers of breaching anti-doping agencies, Pennsylvania nuclear energy company, and chemical weapons investigator.The US Justice Department on Thursday charged seven Russian intelligence officers with hacking anti-doping agencies and other organizations hours after Western officials leveled new accusations against Moscow’s secretive GRU military spy agency.
Hours before the US indictment was announced, Western nations accused the GRU of new cybercrimes, with Dutch and British officials labeling the intelligence agency "brazen" for allegedly targeting the international chemical weapons watchdog and the investigation into the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine.
The US indictment said that the GRU targeted its victims because they had publicly supported a ban on Russian athletes in international sports competitions and because they had condemned Russia’s state-sponsored athlete doping program.
Prosecutors said that the Russians also targeted a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company and an international organization that was investigating chemical weapons in Syria and the poisoning of a former GRU officer.
The indictment says the hacking was often conducted remotely. If that wasn’t successful, the hackers would conduct "on-site" or "close access" hacking operations with trained GRU members traveling with sophisticated equipment to target their victims through Wi-Fi networks
The GRU’s alleged hacking attempts on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons took place in April and were disrupted by authorities, Dutch Defense Minister Ank Bijleveld said. Four Russian intelligence officers were immediately expelled from the Netherlands, she said.
The cascade of condemnation ‐ from the Australian, British and Dutch governments ‐ does more than just point the finger at Moscow. It also ties together a series of norm-shattering spy operations that have straddled the physical world and the digital sphere.
The British ambassador to the Netherlands said that the men caught with spy gear outside The Hague-based OPCW, for example, were from the very same GRU section (Unit 26165) accused by American Sherlocks of having broken into the Democratic National Committee’s email and sowing havoc during the 2016 US presidential election.
The OPCW, in turn, was investigating the poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal in which the nerve agent Novichok was used, a bold operation that British authorities dissected in a minute-by-minute surveillance camera montage last month.
At the same time, Australian and British spies have now endorsed the American intelligence community’s reported attribution of the catastrophic June 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine to the GRU. The malicious software outbreak briefly knocked out cash machines, gas stations, pharmacies and hospitals and, according to a secret White House assessment recently cited by Wired, dealt $10 billion worth of damage worldwide.
Moscow has issued the latest in a series of denials, but the allegations leveled by Western intelligence agencies, supported by a wealth of surveillance footage and overwhelmingly confirmed by independent reporting, paint a picture of the GRU as an agency that routinely crosses red lines ‐ and is increasingly being caught red-handed.