Buzzfeed: Inside the Hunt for Russia's hackers (and how we're ALL the targets)

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/inside-the-hunt-for-russias-hackers?utm_term=.xyO56Bxkll#.cibNWQYm88

Russia’s cyberwarfare operations are built on the back of their cybercriminal networks. Can the US and its allies take them down?

Posted on April 20, 2017, at 7:00 p.m.
Sheera Frenkel



The arrest of Baratov and his co-conspirators signals a broader US government crackdown on Russian cybercriminals. For years, cybersecurity researchers and US authorities have traced the ties between cybercriminals and the Russian state, including how malware first developed for criminal enterprises has made its way into state-sponsored cyberattacks on Russia’s neighbors, and how botnet armies created by hackers have been repurposed to launch attacks on Russian targets. Now, they appear ready to strike. Earlier this month, Spanish authorities acting on behalf of the US arrested Pyotr Levashov, long known to authorities as one of the world’s most prolific spam kingpins. Five months ago, the US named a number of well-known Russian hackers as being behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee, which they say were aimed at influencing the US elections. For those following the murky dealings of the world’s top hackers, the names did not come as a surprise. What was new was the willingness of US officials to publicly name the hackers, and to aggressively pursue Russian cybercriminals who aid Russia’s increasingly aggressive strides into cyberwarfare.

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For weeks, cybersecurity researchers investigating the hacks believed they were looking at a case of corporate espionage. But as the scope of the breach was discovered, researchers began to fear that an enemy of the US was compiling a massive database of all US nationals, complete with personal details and email accounts they could mine for vulnerable information. The indictments issued last month against Baratov, Belan, and the FSB officers revealed that the group had breached Yahoo looking for both political targets and financial targets. The hundreds of millions of other people who had been caught up in the breach were just collateral damage.


“The guys who did this to Yahoo, they were criminals. They could have turned around and sold the entire database to the highest bidder,” the FBI agent said. “We are lucky they didn’t.”

Enough is known about the four men to sketch a rough timeline of how they came together to carry out the hack. Dokuchaev was once known in hacker circles as “Forb,” and he spoke openly about hiring out his services until he was recruited into government work, as the Russian newspaper RBC has reported. At the FSB, Dokuchaev was partnered with Sushchin, and the two recruited Belan, a Latvian-born hacker who had been on a list of the FBI’s most wanted since 2012.

“This is the way it goes: They trap one hacker and then they get him to trap his friends,” said one Russian hacker, who agreed to speak to BuzzFeed News via an encrypted app on condition of anonymity. The hacker, who recently served time in a Russian prison and had fled the country once he was released, said the “pressure was intense” to do work on behalf of Russian intelligence officers. “They press on you. It’s not, like, a nice request. It’s a knock on your door and maybe a knock on your ass. If they can’t threaten you they threaten your family.”

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