Six Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign
Six current and former Russian military officers sought to disrupt through computer hacking the French election, the Winter Olympics and U.S. hospitals and businesses, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed Monday. It details destructive attacks on a broad range of targets and implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
The indictment accuses the defendants, all said to be officers in the Russian military agency known as the GRU, in hacks that prosecutors say were aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests and as retribution against its perceived enemies.
They include attacks against Ukraine’s power grid; a hack-and-leak operation directed at the political party of French President Emmanuel Macron in the days leading up to the 2017 election; efforts to punish Olympics organizers who had banned Russian athletes for doping, and to impede an investigation into the suspected nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter. [Continue reading…]