On Thursday, the US brought charges against five Russian military officers for allegedly conducting cyberattacks into Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure prior to the Russian invasion.
The GRU military intelligence agents from Russia who were charged in Maryland, according to Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, carried out a cyberattack against Ukraine dubbed “Whisper Gate.”
“The WhisperGate campaign included the targeting of civilian infrastructure and Ukrainian computer systems wholly unrelated to the military or national defense,” Olsen said at a press conference in Baltimore.
FBI special agent William DelBagno said the WhisperGate malware attack in January 2022 “could be considered the first shot of the war.”
It was intended to cripple Ukraine’s government and critical infrastructure by targeting financial systems, agriculture, emergency services, healthcare, and schools, DelBagno said.
According to Olsen, the cyberattacks were not limited to Ukraine; they also targeted computer networks in the US and other NATO nations that support Ukraine.
Amin Timovich Stigal, a 22-year-old Russian civilian, was charged in June in Maryland with conspiring to breach computer systems and destroy them in retaliation for his purported role in the WhisperGate scandal.
The State Department has offered a total of $60 million in rewards for information that leads to the arrest of Stigal and the five Russian GRU members. However, Stigal is still at large.
According to Stigal’s indictment, he and other GRU officers infected computer systems of numerous Ukrainian government agencies with the virus WhisperGate before the Russian invasion.
‘Deadly dirty tricks’
The Justice Department said WhisperGate was designed to look like ransomware but was really a “cyberweapon designed to completely destroy the target computer and related data.”
It said patient health records were exfiltrated from computer systems and websites were defaced to read: “Ukrainians! All information about you has become public; be afraid and expect the worst.”
Additionally, the compromised data was put up for sale online.
The convicted GRU officers, according to US Attorney Erek Barron, were a part of unit 29155 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, which he defined as “a military intelligence agency responsible for attempted deadly dirty tricks around the world.”
Colonel Yuriy Denisov, the unit 29155’s commanding commander of cyber operations, and his four lieutenants, Vladislav Borovkov, Denis Denisenko, Dmitriy Goloshubov, and Nikolay Korchagin, were identified in the indictment.
The indictment was made public one day after the US said that Russia’s state-funded news organization, RT, was attempting to sway the US presidential election of 2024.
32 internet domains that were allegedly part of an effort “to secure Russia’s preferred outcome,” which US officials have stated would be Donald Trump winning the November election, were also declared to have been seized by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
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