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The British government directly accused Russian military intelligence of being the source of a series of "indiscriminate and indiscriminate cyber-attacks" perpetrated on the orders of Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, including the hacking of the headquarters in 2016 of the United States Democratic National Committee.
This assertion precedes the announcement of new revelations from the British intelligence services about the involvement of the Russian state in poisoning Salisbury of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.
In an unprecedented statement, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) had discovered that a number of hackers known to have carried out attacks around the world were covering the Russian intelligence services GRU. He added that their attacks had been undertaken with the consent and knowledge of the Kremlin.
The British government claimed that the attacks were carried out "in flagrant violation of international law, affected citizens of a large number of countries, including Russia, and cost the economy millions of dollars. national ".
The Foreign Office has assigned six specific attacks to GRU-supported hackers and identified 12 hacker code names as front-facing GRU – Fancy Bear, Voodoo Bear, APT28, Sofacy, Pawnstorm, Sednit, CyberCaliphate, Cyber Berku, BlackEnergy Actors, STRONTIUM, Tsar Team and Sandworm.
The British government's claims respond to Theresa May's pledge to reveal the full scope of the GRU-related disturbance following Skripal's poisoning earlier this year. Skripal had been a GRU member since 1979 before moving on to the British.
The British government has been exceptionally aggressive in identifying the two men suspected of traveling to Salisbury to poison Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, as Russian intelligence agents. Russian official explanations about the two men's visit to Salisbury were widely ridiculed, which caused tensions within the Russian government about the inept treatment of the episode.
In its statement, Britain identified for the first time four cyber-attacks from Russian sources. These include an attack launched in October 2017 through the BadRabbit ransomware, which rendered the IT unusable, disrupting the Kiev metro, Odessa airport, the Russian central bank and two Russian media .
Other attacks attributed to Russia for the first time are the piracy in 2017 of confidential medical records of international athletes under the control of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the attack of a small British television channel still in activity and finally the piracy of the National Democratic Committee (DNC).
Two other attacks previously attributed to Russia were also highlighted in the United Kingdom statement.
The cyber attack on the headquarters of the DNC, essential to the outcome of the 2016 elections, has often been attributed to the Russians, but it is the first time that British intelligence services make this claim.
In an accompanying statement, Hunt said, "These cyber attacks do not serve a legitimate national security interest, they affect the ability of people around the world to live their daily lives without interference and even to practice sport.
"The actions of the GRU are reckless and blind: they try to undermine and interfere in elections in other countries; they are even ready to harm Russian businesses and citizens. This type of behavior demonstrates their willingness to act without respect for international law or established norms, and this with a sense of impunity and without consequences. "
Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the defense think tank Rusi said, "Most intelligence services are trying to gain an advantage by stealing the secrets of their opponents. But the activities of the GRU go well beyond this traditional role of espionage in peacetime. By launching disruptive operations that threaten life in target societies, they blur the dividing line between war and peace. "
The Foreign Office warning came as the United States was preparing to propose cyber-defense operations on behalf of NATO's defense alliance with 29 countries, an issue on which the United Kingdom was in danger. head. NATO said it would create a cyberspace operations center to coordinate NATO's cyber activities, including by integrating the cyber-capabilities of each country into the operations of the alliance.
In a speech on Monday night, Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former UK National Security Advisor, warned that cyber-attacks were now one of the biggest threats to the survival of the global order. liberal.
He said that 50% of all British companies had been attacked and had to invest millions of dollars in cybersecurity.
The new allegations can not be considered as propaganda on the part of Russia, but Lyall Grant said that Putin would be surprised by the depth of the revelation of the acts of his intelligence services.
