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By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. on Thursday charged five Russian intelligence officials and a Russian civilian with conspiring to launch cyberattacks against Ukraine and its allies in a bid to hobble Kyiv.
In a revised indictment unsealed on Thursday, the Justice Department said a cyber unit of Russia's military intelligence agency conducted "large-scale cyber operations" starting as far back as 2020, before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
In addition to targeting Ukraine, they allegedly targeted the systems of at least 26 NATO countries by scanning them for vulnerabilities, according to the indictment.
Russia's embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email.
The original indictment, filed in June in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, only named a single defendant: Amin Stigal.
It accused him of conspiring with Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, to launch cyber attacks against computer systems in Ukraine and other countries, including a computer network maintained by an unnamed U.S. agency in Maryland.
The GRU officers and members of the Unit 29155 who were named in the indictment are Yuriy Denisov, Vladislav Borovkov, Denis Denisenko, Dmitry Goloshubov, and Nikolay Korchagin.
Thursday's news comes just one day after the U.S. took several legal actions against Russia to combat alleged efforts to meddle in the 2024 presidential elections, including charging two employees of the Russian state media network RT and sanctioning RT and its top network editor.
It also came on the same day that the Justice Department announced it had secured two indictments against Russian TV contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife over sanctions violations and money laundering.
Earlier on Thursday, intelligence agencies in the U.S., Britain and the European Union warned that a cyber espionage group located within Russia's GRU known as "Unit 29155" was destructively targeting critical national infrastructure.
Unit 29155, which is the group at the heart of Thursday's indictment, is a covert part of the GRU which carries out subversion, sabotage and assassination missions outside Russia, Western officials told Reuters.
Members of the unit were behind the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in Britain in 2018, and an attempted coup in Montenegro two years earlier, according to the New York Times.
It has also used its cyber capabilities to carry out destructive attacks against Kyiv.
In the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the unit, which is tracked by security researchers at Microsoft as “Cadet Blizzard,” deployed data-wiping malware dubbed “WhisperGate” to Ukrainian government computer networks.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and James Pearson in London; additional reporting by Simon Lewis in Washington; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
