Regulators called the news “the dark art of the possible when it comes to critical infrastructure.”
American authorities said Thursday that they will bring charges against a group of hackers that they allege work for the Russian government and were involved in a coordinated campaign to attack the global energy sector.
Regulators called the news “the dark art of the possible when it comes to critical infrastructure.”
The news came via unsealed indictments from the Justice Department, which said the group had targeted 135 countries worldwide in an attempt to paralyze parts of the world’s energy network.
“Russian state-sponsored hackers pose a serious and persistent threat to critical infrastructure both in the United States and around the world,” Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney general, said in a statement.
“Although the criminal charges unsealed today reflect past activity, they make crystal clear the urgent ongoing need for American businesses to harden their defenses and remain vigilant.”
Attacks Took Out Refineries and Allied Infrastructure
The DoJ said the attacks ranged between 2012 and 2018, and underscored a recent warning from American President Joe Biden that Russia has sophisticated cyber warfare technology that it may soon deploy in its conflict with the U.S. over the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Mikhail Gavrilov, Evgeny Gladkikh, Marat Tyukov, Pavel Akulov were all charged in the indictments.
Several of them are allegedly officers with the Federal Security Service (FSB), who specialized in finding ways to give the Kremlin access and control to various computer networks at energy companies around the world.
Gladkikh is accused of using a malware system dubbed Triton to access an American company in an attempt to create a way to automatically shutdown its refinery if needed.
That reportedly worked, the indictment said, resulting in taking offline an unnamed refinery and its systems, and later on a similar Saudi facility. The indictment says that Gladkikh was allegedly less successful on a “U.S.-based company’s similar facilities.”
Biden’s Warning Carries New Resonance
The unsealing of the documents just days after Biden warned the American business community to up its cyber defenses is unlikely to be a coincidence.
While most Americans are familiar with Russian hackers after they interfered in the 2016 presidential election, few are aware of how close they are — or even actively now — to taking major chunks of U.S. infrastructure offline.
TheStreet detailed that effort in a two-part series here.
Businesses who are alert and prepared for cybersecurity attacks may fare best, Biden said during remarks at the Business Roundtable Quarterly Meeting in Washington earlier this week.
Biden went so far as to call preparing for cyber warfare a “patriotic obligation” that could help the American effort to aid Ukraine thus far.
“[It is] a patriotic obligation that you invest as much as you can in making sure — and we will help in any way — that you have built up your technological capacity to deal with cyber attacks,” he said.
