The Russia connectionRussia increasingly uses hacker mercenaries for cyberattacks: FBI
FBI director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Thursday that state-actors such as Russia are increasingly relying on hacker mercenaries, blurring the lines between government-backed hackers and cyber criminals. Wray told lawmakers that increasingly, such hybrid government-criminal breaches are becoming a reality. “You have the blend of a nation-state actor, in that case, the Russian intelligence service, using the assistance of criminal hackers, which you think of almost like mercenaries, being used to commit cyberattacks,” the FBI director said.
FBI director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Thursday that state-actors such as Russia are increasingly relying on hacker mercenaries, blurring the lines between government-backed hackers and cyber criminals.
The FBI, by indicting two Russian intelligence officers and two criminal co-defendants for a major breach of the Yahoo email service in March, wanted to send the Russian government the message, Wray said.
“We are seeing an emergence of that kind of collaboration which used to be two separate things—nation-state actors and criminal hackers,” Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee. “Now there’s this collusion, if you will.”
DHS is also following the trend, Acting Secretary Elaine Duke told the committee. “What we’re having to do is really understand, as the director said earlier, the difference between state actors, people [who are] maybe just looking for financial gain and those hybrid actors and that’s become more difficult,” she said.
The Free Beacon reports that U.S. officials have long feared that cybercriminal networks, which operate with relative impunity in Russia, could be deputized to conduct hacking operations which serve the Kremlin’s interests.
Russian President Vladimir Putin even said that it may have been Russian “patriotic hackers” who might have been behind the email breaches of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Wray told lawmakers that increasingly, such hybrid government-criminal breaches are becoming a reality.
“You have the blend of a nation-state actor, in that case, the Russian intelligence service, using the assistance of criminal hackers, which you think of almost like mercenaries, being used to commit cyberattacks,” the FBI director said.
“Russia is attempting to assert its place in the world and relying more creatively on a form of asymmetric warfare to damage and weaken this country economically and otherwise,” he said.
“On a scale of 1 to 10,” Acting Secretary Duke told lawmakers, the threat of a cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure is “a 7 or an 8.” “Because what we know is daunting and we don’t know what we don’t know,” she added.
