The indictment on the website of the American Ministry lists the names of Russians: Alexey Morenets, Yevgeny Serebryakov, Oleg Sotnikov and Alexey Minin, Ivan Ermakov, Artem Malyshev, Dmitry Badin. All men are accused of computer fraud, five of them, gentlemen Morens, Serebryakov, Ermakov, Malyshev, Badin, are charged with two episodes of identity theft.
On the expulsion of the first four of them previously reported the Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands. They are suspected of planning a hacker attack on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in April 2018. At that time, her experts were investigating the poisoning in the British Salisbury of the former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The Russian Permanent Mission to the OPCW declined to comment on the charges.
The last three, according to the US Department of Justice, worked from Moscow. Previously, their names appeared on the list of 12 alleged GRU employees, who in July were charged in absentia as part of the investigation by US Special Prosecutor Robert Muller about Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Moreover, when they could not remotely hack the system, since they did not have the necessary access rights, the defendants came to the countries where their target was and hacked into computer networks by connecting to them via internal Wi-Fi.
The documents on the site of the agency said that the accused from December 2014 to May 2018 carried out attacks on computer networks of American citizens, international organizations and their employees around the world. “All the suspects are accused of illegal money laundering, which in this case means that they used cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, to pay for infrastructure to implement their plans, for example, servers, to register domains, to pay for vendors and to purchase other tools for hacking “- said at a press conference attorney of the western district of the state of Pennsylvania Scott Brady.
According to investigators, the defendants tried to hack the network of anti-doping agencies and organizations, including WADA, USADA, Sports Arbitration Court, International Association of Athletics Federations, FIFA, and also hacked the server of the nuclear company Westinghouse, which supplied fuel for nuclear reactors to Ukraine. It is alleged that they published the stolen information on behalf of the Fancy Bear hacker group, trying to delegitize the efforts of international organizations.
