Russian GRU Unit 29155 is best known for its long list of murder and sabotage ops, which include the Salisbury poisonings in England, arms depot explosions in Czechia, and an attempted coup d’etat in Montenegro. But its activities in cyberspace remained in the shadows — until now. After reviewing a trove of hidden data, The Insider can report that the Kremlin’s most notorious black ops squad also fielded a team of hackers — one that attempted to destabilize Ukraine in the months before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
For members of Russia’s most notorious black ops unit, they look like children. Even their photographs on the FBI’s “wanted” poster show a group of spies born around the time Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. But then, hacking is a young man’s business.
In August 2024, the U.S. Justice Department indicted Vladislav Borovkov, Denis Denisenko, Dmitriy Goloshubov, Nikolay Korchagin, Amin Stigal and Yuriy Denisov for conducting “large-scale cyber operations to harm computer systems in Ukraine prior to the 2022 Russian invasion,” using malware to wipe data from systems connected to Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, emergency services, even its agricultural industry, and masking their efforts as plausibly deniable acts of “ransomware” – digital blackmail. Their campaign was codenamed “WhisperGate.”
The hackers posted the personal medical data, criminal records, and car registrations of untold numbers of Ukrainians. The hackers also probed computer networks “associated with twenty-six NATO member countries, searching for potential vulnerabilities” and, in October 2022, gained unauthorized access to computers linked to Poland’s transportation sector, which was vital for the inflow and outflow of millions of Ukrainians – and for the transfer of crucial Western weapons systems to Kyiv.
More newsworthy than the superseding indictment of this sextet of hackers was the organization they worked for: Unit 29155 of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU. In the past decade and a half, this elite team of operatives has been responsible for the Novichok poisonings of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev, an abortive coup in Montenegro, and a series of explosions of arms and ammunition depots in Bulgaria and Czechia.
Unit 29155 is Russia’s kill and sabotage squad. But now they were being implicated for the first time as state hackers. Moreover, the U.S. government made a compelling case that Unit 29155 was engaged in cyber attacks designed to destabilize Ukraine in advance of Russian tanks and soldiers stealing across the border – if this were true, it would mean that at least one formidable arm of Russian military intelligence knew about a war that other Russian special services were famously kept in the dark about. This hypothesis is consistent with prior findings by The Insider showing that members of 29155 were deployed into Ukraine a few days before the full-scale invasion.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that the country didn’t believe a series of submarine cable cuts in the Baltic Sea were simply coincidental.
The Silver Dania is the third ship detained in recent weeks over concerns of intentional damage to subsea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
Another undersea data cable, this time connecting Sweden and Latvia, has been severed in the Baltic Sea, officials from both countries said Sunday. The incident prompted Sweden to launch a criminal probe into the matter and seize a "suspect vessel" vessel headed for Russia.
Russia and other hostile states have become increasingly brazen in adopting “gray zone” attacks against Europe and the United States, leaving defense officials with a dilemma: How to respond?
The Eagle S is suspected of damaging the Estlink-2 power cable which runs under the Baltic Sea between Finland and Estonia by dragging its anchor along the seabed on Christmas Day.
Police in Finland say the crew of a Russia-linked tanker suspected of damaging a power cable under the Baltic Sea have been detained indefinitely.
The Eagle S crew consists of 24 people with Finland’s Central Criminal Police imposing movement restrictions on eight.
Seven crew members of the seized ship Eagle S are being treated as suspects as Finland investigates undersea cable sabotage and alleged Russian spying.
One day at the dawn of the 1980s, an FBI agent in his 30s named Rick Smith walked into the Balboa Café, an ornate, historic watering hole in San Francisco’s leafy Cow Hollow neighborhood. Smith, who was single at the time, lived nearby and regularly frequented the spot.
As he approached the oak wood bar to order a drink he suddenly spotted a familiar face — someone Smith had met about a year before, after the man had walked into the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. He was Austrian by birth, but a denizen of Silicon Valley, an entrepreneur who operated as a middleman between American tech companies and European countries hungry for the latest hi-tech goods.
Cette nuit, de nouveaux actes de vandalisme viennent perturber l’accès à Internet cette fois-ci. Selon nos informations, des fibres « longhaul » (longues distances, généralement plusieurs centaines de kilomètres) sont coupées à plusieurs endroits, provoquant des perturbations au niveau national. Les fibres relient des grandes villes – Paris, Lille, Strasbourg, Marseille, Lyon… – et servent d’artères pour Internet.
The attack comes a few days after a coordinated arson assault on the French rail network.
Russian military intelligence, the G.R.U., is behind arson attacks aimed at undermining support for Ukraine’s war effort, security officials say.
The sabotage of more than 20 trains in Poland by apparent supporters of Russia was carried out with a simple “radio-stop” command anyone could broadcast with $30 in equipment.
En début de semaine, un lien backbone qui véhicule Internet du nord au sud de la France a été tronçonné près d’Aix-en-Provence. Les conséquences sont mineures, mais interrogent sur la fragilité des infrastructures.
A travers plusieurs mises à jour de projets open source, des développeurs ont manifesté leur opposition à l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine. Si dans certains cas, l’impact se limite à des messages de sensibilisation, certains projets vont jusqu’à inclure des logiciels malveillants.
The volunteers who run open-source software projects are changing the code so that they display anti-war messages—or even wipe entire files.
When code with millions of downloads nukes user files, bad things can happen.
In what's an act of deliberate sabotage, the developer behind the popular "node-ipc" NPM package shipped a new tampered version to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, raising concerns about security in the open-source and the software supply chain.
Western intelligence agencies are investigating a cyberattack by unidentified hackers that disrupted broadband satellite internet access in Ukraine coinciding with Russia's invasion, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident.
Des milliers de particuliers et d’entreprises européennes sont sans connexion depuis le 24 février. De plus en plus d’éléments pointent vers le sabotage d’un satellite, en lien avec le conflit ukrainien.
A Ukrainian cyber guerrilla warfare group plans to launch digital sabotage attacks against critical Russian infrastructure such as railways and the electricity grid, to strike back at Moscow over its invasion, a hacker team coordinator told Reuters.
