PerspectiveRussian Spies Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Heart of Trump Impeachment Trial, Company Says

Operatives of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service which orchestrated the hacking and social media campaign in 2016 to help put Donald Trump in the White House, have hacked Burisma Holdings, the  Ukrainian gas company which is at the center of the upcoming impeachment trial of President Trump. Trump withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukraine to announce that it was investigating Burisma, on whose board Joe Biden’s son served from 2014 to 2019.

Ellen Nakashima writes in the Washington Post that

the GRU launched a cyber “phishing” campaign against Burisma Holdings to trick unsuspecting employees into giving up their email credentials so the hackers could gain access to their email accounts — once again entangling Moscow in domestic U.S. politics, according to Area 1 Security, a Redwood City, Calif., company.

The operation’s launch coincided with a congressional impeachment inquiry into Trump and whether he abused his office by seeking to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a probe of Burisma and Hunter Biden — an action that conceivably would aid Trump’s reelection bid.

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Trump has publicly downplayed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions and has suggested that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. He and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, have promoted an unfounded theory that Joe Biden, while vice president, tried to quash a corruption investigation of Burisma to protect his son. Hunter Biden is no longer on Burisma’s board.

“The timing of the GRU’s campaign in relation to the 2020 U.S. elections raises the specter that this is an early warning of what we have anticipated since the successful cyberattacks undertaken during the 2016 U.S. elections,” Oren Falkowitz, Area 1 Security’s chief executive, told Nakashima. He added: “The timing of the GRU’s campaign in relation to the 2020 U.S. elections raises the specter that this is an early warning of what we have anticipated since the successful cyberattacks undertaken during the 2016 U.S. elections.”

The GRU campaign “demonstrates that there are a lot of targets that can be attacked by those who would interfere in our elections,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts. “We should expect to see more of these reports.”

Moscow’s efforts are aimed at undermining our elections, Rosenberger said. “The goal is to undermine our institutions,” she said.