The United States accuses Russian agents of a global campaign of cyber attacks between 2015 and 2019

Six members of the Russian military espionage agency (known as GRU, acronym in Russian) have been accused on Monday by the US Department of Justice of various global cyberattacks, including assaults on Ukraine's electricity grid, the French presidential elections in 2017 and the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

According to Assistant Attorney General for Homeland Security John Demers, "no country has used its computing capabilities as maliciously or irresponsibly as Russia, deliberately inflicting unprecedented damage to achieve paltry tactical advantages but satisfying revenge."

The charges brought against the six men in a court in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) are conspiracy, computer hacking, fraud, identity theft and false registration of a name or domain.

It is highly unlikely that officers will face a court in the US for the above offenses.

Moscow is unlikely to hand them over to Washington.

What the charges can carry is the limitation of their movements abroad and the possibility that they will be arrested if they enter a country that is willing to hand them over to the United States. The announcement comes two weeks before the presidential elections in the United States between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

The six members - active or in reserve - of the GRU have also been accused of launching the malware attack known as NotPetya, which in June 2017 infected computers around the world.

Initially, NotPetya was directed against Ukraine but it ended up having a boomerang effect around the world, paralyzing some of the largest corporations in Europe and the United States at a cost of more than 10 billion dollars.

It is the most expensive hacking act in history.

For example, the manufacturer of the Oreo and Ritz cookies incurred losses of more than 100 million dollars.

Pharmaceutical Mertz added a total of 700 million in damages.

This group of Russian computer scientists and agents of the Directorate of Espionage allegedly boycotted investigations into the poisoning with a nerve agent of the former Russian double spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom in 2018. They also attacked the media in the Republic of Georgia in 2018 and 2019.

Three years ago I learned of a group of hackers hitting Ukraine with relentless, disruptive cyberattacks — with effects that would soon spread globally.

Today, my book that tells the story of that first true cyberwar is out: SANDWORM.

I hope you'll read it.

https://t.co/3TdSKrBd4l

- Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) November 5, 2019

The

Russian

group

, known as Sandworm, has previously been accused by Washington of attacks on America's electoral infrastructure and leaking emails from the Democratic Party in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States.

In fact, one of those accused by the special prosecutor Robert Mueller in the investigation of the Russian plot, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, is again among those responsible for this campaign of cyberattacks.

For John Hultquist (as quoted by

), director of espionage threats at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm based in Silicon Valley, “if anyone was under the impression that after 2016 they were going to abandon and stop their behavior aggressive, the fact that they were able to storm the Olympics should have changed his mind. "

"It was an act of revenge," says Hultquist in the New York newspaper.

"There was no specific geopolitical reason for this," continues the expert, who concludes that what Sandworm achieved was "to impact the international community as a whole."

The Deputy Director of the FBI, David Bowdich, wanted for his part to insist that Moscow "is a computer adversary with great capacity and the information revealed shows how widespread and destructive its actions are."

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