Since the Russian military agency known as the GRU first entered the spotlight as the hackers that targeted the 2016 US election, it's become increasingly known as the actor behind much of the Kremlin’s most brazen digital behavior. It's responsible for everything from the first-ever blackout triggered by hackers—turning off the power to a quarter million Ukrainians in December 2015—to NotPetya, the worst cyberattack in history, a worm that inflicted $10 billion in damage.
In recent years, security researchers have also found a web of evidence—some of which has until now remained unpublished—that definitively ties the group to other, more mysterious incidents. Those include the breach of two US state boards of elections in 2016, the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics, and the hacking of the French election in 2017. In fact, those fingerprints link much of that global chaos not just to the GRU, but to a single group of hackers within the agency known as Sandworm.
"This group is tasked with the most aggressive behavior we see from Russia, and possibly the most aggressive we see, period," says John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at security firm FireEye, whose team discovered and named Sandworm in the fall of 2014. "That behavior seems to run the gamut from election interference to technical disruption of the power grid. I can’t think of another group that can claim to have not only tried so many brazen acts, but actually pulled them off."
I’ve also followed Sandworm's escalating attacks over t ..
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