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6 Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign

The American flag flies outside of the Justice Department building, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department announced charges Monday against Russian intelligence officers in a string of global cyberattacks that targeted a French presidential election, the Winter Olympics in South Korea and American businesses. The case implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections, but is not related to the November vote.

The indictment accuses the six
defendants, all said to be current and former officers in the Russian
military intelligence agency known as the GRU, of hacks that prosecutors
say were aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests and
in destabilizing or punishing perceived enemies. All told, the attacks
caused billions of dollars in losses and disrupted a broad cross-section
of life, including health care in Pennsylvania, a power grid serving
hundreds of thousands of customers in Ukraine and a French election that
saw the late-stage disclosure of hacked emails.

The seven-count
indictment is the most recent in a series of Justice Department
prosecutions of Russian hackers, often working on behalf of the
government. Past cases have focused on attacks against targets like
internet giant Yahoo and the 2016 presidential contest, when Russian
hackers from the GRU stole Democratic emails that were released online
in the weeks before the election.

The attacks in this case are
“some of the most destructive, most costly, most egregious cyber attacks
ever known,” said Scott Brady, the U.S. Attorney for the Western
District of Pennsylvania, where the 50-page indictment was filed.

“Time
and again, Russia has made it clear: They will not abide by accepted
norms, and instead, they intend to continue their destructive,
destabilizing cyber behavior,” said FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich.

The
indictment does not charge the defendants in connection with
interference in American elections, though the officers are part of the
same intelligence unit that prosecutors say interfered in the 2016 U.S.
election. One of the six charged in the case announced Monday was among
the Russian military intelligence officers charged with hacking in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

The
timing of the indictment was unrelated to the upcoming election in the
U.S., said Assistant Attorney General John Demers. He said that despite
ongoing warnings of Russian interference in the election, Americans
“should be confident that a vote cast for their candidate will be
counted for that candidate.”

The hacking targets described in
Monday’s case are diverse, with the indictment fleshing out details
about attacks that in some instances had already received significant
attention because of the havoc they had caused.

The indictment
accuses the officers, for instance, of hacking into the 2018 Winter
Olympics in South Korea after Russia was punished by the International
Olympic Committee for a vast doping conspiracy.

Prosecutors say
the hackers unleashed a devastating malicious software attack during the
opening ceremony in February 2018 that deleted data from thousands of
computers related to the event and left them inoperable. Russia then
tried to pin blame on North Korea in what prosecutors say was a failed
“false flag” attempt.

Another attack was aimed at disrupting the
2017 presidential election in France through hacks that targeted local
government entities, campaigns and political parties, including the
party of current President Emmanuel Macron.

The controversy known
as the “Macron Leaks” involved the leak of over 20,000 emails linked to
Macron’s campaign in the days before his victory. The involvement of
bots raised questions about the possible involvement of Vladimir Putin
and the Russian government. The leaks, which gained huge media attention
in France, were shared by WikiLeaks and several alt-right activists on
Twitter, Facebook and others.

Other attacks targeted
international investigators looking into the suspected nerve agent
poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the
United Kingdom, as well as the country of Georgia, where roughly 15,000
websites were defaced.

“In many cases,” the indictment says, “the
Conspirators replaced website home pages with an image of a former
Georgian president, who was known for his efforts to counter Russian
influence in Georgia, along with the caption, ‘I’ll be back.’”

Beyond
that, though, the hacks had harmful impacts on quality-of-life for
everyday citizens. The attacks in Ukraine, for instance, disrupted the
power supply in the middle of winter for hundreds of thousands of
customers, officials say.

And the global malware attack known as
NotPetya that infected computers across the world harmed the operations
of the Heritage Valley Heath System, which prosecutors say serves tens
of thousands of people in western Pennsylvania. Work stations were
locked, hard drives encrypted, laboratory records and other files were
inaccessible, and Heritage Valley temporarily lost access to critical
computer systems related to medical care.

Robert Lee, a security
researcher who helped uncover the malware used in one of the Ukraine
hacks, said U.S. and European political leaders should have done more at
the time to call out Russia and make clear that attacks on power grids
are unacceptable.

But Lee, CEO of security firm Dragos, also
welcomed the indictment as an important message before the U.S.
presidential election about American officials’ resolve to fight back
against attacks on elections and civic infrastructure.

“This is a
broad signal from U.S. intelligence to say, ‘We’re watching you and
we’re willing to burn our resources to burn your resources,’” Lee said.
“Leading up to the election, I think that’s an important signal to
send.”

The six defendants face charges including conspiracy to
conduct computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud and aggravated identity
theft. None is currently in custody, but the Justice Department in
recent years has eagerly charged foreign hackers in absentia in
countries including Russia, China and Iran with the goal of creating a
message of deterrence.

“No country has weaponized its cyber capabilities as maliciously and irresponsibly as Russia, wantonly causing unprecedented collateral damage to pursue small tactical advantages as fits of spite,” said Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official.

Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Paris, Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, and Graham Dunbar in Geneva, Switzerland, contributed to this report.