New indictments against Russian cyber-crime

John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, issued a statement yesterday about new indictments against Russian officials over cyber-espionage, part of which involved a kind of propaganda (USDOJ press release 10/04/2018):

A short while ago, the Dutch Minister of Defense and the United Kingdom’s National Security Advisor held a joint press conference announcing a recent intelligence operation against several Russian agents conducting a clandestine mission in The Hague.

The Joint UK/Dutch intelligence operation led to four Russian GRU officers being caught red handed in The Hague, while they attempted to breach the cyber security of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW].

This GRU target and an additional laboratory in Switzerland that was their next target were analyzing the deadly Russian nerve-agent recovered in the UK following an assassination attempt, as well as other chemical agents that were used in Syria against innocent civilians. ...

Our indictment today charges some of the same Russian operatives caught in The Hague, along with their colleagues in Moscow, as part of a conspiracy to hack a variety of individuals and organizations, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, to obtain information or access that was then exploited for the benefit of the Russian government.

More specifically, this indictment alleges a conspiracy to use computer hacking to obtain non-public, personal health information about athletes and others in the files of anti-doping agencies and sporting federations in multiple countries, and to release that stolen information selectively, and sometimes misleadingly. All of this was done to undermine those organizations’ efforts to ensure the integrity of the Olympic and other games. Other targets of this conspiracy were the chemical weapons laboratory in The Hague and a nuclear power company here in America.

Three of the seven defendants charged in this case were previously charged in the indictment brought by the Office of Special Counsel in July of this year, which pertained to a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The current indictment did not arise out of the Special Counsel’s work. Nonetheless, these two indictments charge overlapping groups of conspirators. And they evince some of the same methods of computer intrusion and the same overarching Russian strategic goal: to pursue its interests through illegal influence and disinformation operations aimed at muddying or altering perceptions of the truth. [my emphasis]

The alleged cyber-attacks on weapons labs, the OPCW, and the nuclear power company are more in line with traditional espionage hard targets, targets that have some important national security role or could become targets for sabotage.

But probing the anti-doping agencies and sports federations to find potentially embarassing material to irritate other countries over the Olympics sounds more like an effort looking for propaganda material and/or facilitating Russian cheating at the Olympics. Obviously, releasing private individuals' medical records without their consent would be a bad act in itself. And poking around in those institutions could also potentially be used for blackmail or possibly help gain access to other systems with more obvious national security signficance.

Two things strike me in this press release. One is that while private acts of this kind are crimes that should be prosecuted, considering them individually as acts of war would be a blank check for every warmonger and mischief-maker with access to influence foreign and military policy. And what countries would we not be at war with by that standard? Even Micronesia has probably engaged in some kind of cyber-espionage on the US, who knows?

The other is that the goal of using information to make propaganda and misinformation around the Olympics strikes me as kind of a petty goal in the grand scheme of things. How that could function as political propaganda that might have any significan effect in US politics isn't at all clear.