The Russian connectionA First: U.S. brings hacking charges against two Russian government officials
The United States, for the first time, has brought hacking charges against Russian government officials. The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage. The Justice Department has previously charged Russians with cybercrime – and brought prosecutions against hackers sponsored by the Chinese and Iranian governments – but the new indictments are the first time a criminal case is being brought against Russian government officials.
The United States, for the first time, has brought hacking charges against Russian government officials. The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage.
The Justice Department decision comes against the backdrop of several investigations into the broad Russian government’s hacking and disinformation campaign to help Donald Trump become president – and into the contacts between several Trump campaign officials and operatives of the FSB and the GRU, the Russian domestic and military intelligence services, respectively.
The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department has previously charged Russians with cybercrime – and brought prosecutions against hackers sponsored by the Chinese and Iranian governments – but that the new indictments are the first time a criminal case is being brought against Russian government officials.
U.S. officials said that the two Russian defendants had hacked Yahoo, Google, and other webmail providers in order to obtain information on millions of subscribers.
The two indicted FSB officers are Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, his superior. The two men worked for the cyber investigative arm of the FSB — a rough equivalent of the FBI’s Cyber Division.
The defendants also targeted Russian journalists and government officials, U.S. prosecutors said.
The attacks were carried out from sometime in 2014 to September 2016, and the hackers continued to use the information they stole until the end of 2016.
Prosecutors did connect the hacking of Yahoo to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
“We’re here for one of the largest data breaches in US history,” Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord said.
“Today we are announcing the indictment of four individuals responsible for the 2014 hacking… of Yahoo, the theft of information about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts, and use of that information to obtain the contents of accounts at Yahoo and other providers.”
FBI executive assistant director Paul Abbate added: “We are extremely grateful as well to our international partners for their assistance and support leading up to these criminal charges today.
“Those partners include Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police and, as mentioned, the Toronto police service and their fugitive squad.
“As well, the United Kingdom’s MI5 made substantial contributions to the advancement of this investigation also.”
The Post notes that there were two massive hacks of Yahoo systems, one in 2013 and one in 2014. “In the 2014 hack, the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service, and a successor to the KGB — sought the information for intelligence purposes, targeting journalists, dissidents and U.S. government officials, but allowed the criminal hackers to use the email cache for the officials’ and the hackers’ financial gain, through spamming and other operations,” the Post notes.
The charges “illustrate the murky world of Russian intel services using criminal hackers in a wide variety of ways,” Milan Patel, a former FBI Cyber Division supervisory special agent who is now a managing director at K2 Intelligence, a cyber firm, told the Post.
