US Indicts Sandworm, Russia's Most Destructive Cyberwar Unit
By Andy Greenberg
Published: 2020-10-19 · Archived: 2026-04-05 16:35:26 UTC
The Department of Justice has named and charged six men for allegedly carrying out many of the most costly
cyberattacks in history.
The GRU building known as the Tower, in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, where Sandworm
operates.Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/REUTERS/Alamy
Nearly half a decade ago, the Russian hackers known as Sandworm hit Western Ukraine with the first-ever
cyberattack to cause a blackout, an unprecedented act of cyberwar that turned off the lights for a quarter million
Ukrainians. They were just getting started. From there Sandworm embarked on a years-long spree of wantonly
destructive attacks: another blackout attack on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in 2016, the release of the NotPetya
worm in 2017 that spread globally from Ukraine to cause $10 billion in damage, and a cyberattack that
temporarily destroyed the IT backend of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, among others.
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Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED covering hacking, cybersecurity, and surveillance. He’s the author
of the books Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency and Sandworm: A New
Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. His books ... Read More
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Source: https://www.wired.com/story/us-indicts-sandworm-hackers-russia-cyberwar-unit/
https://www.wired.com/story/us-indicts-sandworm-hackers-russia-cyberwar-unit/
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