Mercenary Hackers Funded By Nation-States
Lines between government-backed hackers and cyber criminals are getting blurred, as indicated by recent the FBI indictment of two Russian intelligence officers and two criminal co-defendants for a major breach of the Yahoo email service.
Earlier this FBI Director Christopher Wray told the US Congressional Homeland Security Committee, “We are seeing an emergence of that kind of collaboration which used to be two separate things, nation-state actors and criminal hackers."
The Homeland Security Department is also following the trend, acting Secretary Elaine Duke told the committee. “What we’re having to do is really understand, as the director said earlier, the difference between state actors, people [who are] maybe just looking for financial gain and those hybrid actors and that’s become more difficult,” she said. Homeland Security leads civilian government cyber-security and helps critical infrastructure providers, such as airports, banks and hospitals, secure their computer networks.
US officials have long feared that cyber-criminal networks, which operate with relative impunity in parts of Russia, could be deputised for hacking operations that serve the Kremlin’s interests.
Russian President Vladimir Putin even speculated that “patriotic hackers” in Russia might have been responsible for email breaches at Democratic political organisations that sowed chaos during the 2016 US presidential election. He’s disputed, however, US intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Russian government ordered those breaches.
Historically this type of government/criminal action goes a long way back and one relevant association was/is with pirates on the seas and oceans where the pirates that were commissioned by a government were called privateers and many governments used them against their opposition/enemy including the English against the Spanish in the 16th/17th centuries.
Such hybrid government-criminal breaches are increasingly becoming a reality, Wray told lawmakers. “You have the blend of a nation-state actor, in that case, the Russian intelligence service, using the assistance of criminal hackers, which you think of almost like mercenaries, being used to commit cyberattacks,” the FBI director said. “Russia is attempting to assert its place in the world and relying more creatively on a form of asymmetric warfare to damage and weaken this country economically and otherwise,” he said.
It’s highly unlikely the Russian Yahoo hackers will see a US courtroom because the US does not have an extradition agreement with Russia, Wray acknowledged. “On the other hand, if they travel, that’s going to be a challenge for them because they are now, at that point, fugitives wanted by the FBI,” he said.
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