To the FBI, Evgeniy Bogachev is the most wanted cybercriminal in the world. The bureau has announced a US$3 million bounty for his capture, the most ever for computer crimes.
However, it is clear that for Russia, he is more than just a criminal. At one point, Bogachev had control over as many as 1 million computers in multiple countries, with possible access to everything from family vacation photographs and term papers to business proposals and highly confidential personal information.
It is almost certain that computers belonging to government officials and contractors in several countries were among the infected devices. For Russia’s surveillance-obsessed intelligence community, Bogachev’s exploits may have created an irresistible opportunity for espionage.
While Bogachev was draining bank accounts, it appears that Russian authorities were looking over his shoulder, searching the same computers for files and e-mails.
In effect, they were grafting an intelligence operation onto a far-reaching cybercriminal scheme, sparing themselves the hard work of hacking into the computers themselves, officials said.
The Russians were particularly interested, it seems, in information from military and intelligence services regarding fighting in eastern Ukraine and the war in Syria, according to law enforcement officials and the cybersecurity firm Fox-IT.
However, there also appear to have been attempts to gain access to sensitive military and intelligence information on infected computers in the US, often consisting of searches for documents containing the words “top secret” or “Department of Defense.”
The Russian government has plenty of its own cyberspace tools for gathering intelligence, but the piggybacking on Bogachev’s activities offers some clues to the breadth and creativity of Russia’s espionage efforts at a time when the US and Europe are scrambling to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks capable of destroying critical infrastructure, disrupting bank operations, stealing government secrets and undermining democratic elections.
This relationship is illustrated by the improbable mix of characters targeted with the sanctions announced by former US president Barack Obama’s administration.
Four were senior officers with Russia’s powerful military intelligence agency, the GRU. Two were suspected cyberthieves on the FBI’s most wanted list: an ethnic Russian from Latvia named Alexsey Belan with a red-tinted Justin Bieber haircut, and Bogachev, whose FBI file includes a photograph of him holding his spotted Bengal cat while wearing a matching set of leopard-print pajamas.
The FBI has long been stymied in its efforts to get Russian cybercriminals. For a time, the bureau had high hopes that its agents and Russian investigators with the Russian Federal Security Bureau would work together to target Russian thieves who had made a specialty of stealing Americans’ credit card information and breaking into their bank accounts.
However, help rarely seemed to materialize. After a while, agents began to worry that Russian authorities were recruiting the very suspects that the FBI was pursuing.
The joke among US Department of Justice officials was the Russians were more likely to pin a medal on a suspected criminal hacker than help the FBI nab him.
“Almost all the hackers who have been announced by the US government through indictments are immediately tracked by the Russian government,” said Arkady Bukh, a New York-based lawyer who often represents Russian hackers arrested in the US.
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