Andy Greenberg
Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has long had a reputation as one of the world's most aggressive practitioners of sabotage, assassination, and cyber warfare, with hackers who take pride in working under the same banner as violent special forces operators. But one new group within that agency shows how the GRU may be intertwining physical and digital tactics more tightly than ever before: a hacking team, which has emerged from the same unit responsible for Russia's most notorious physical tactics, including poisonings, attempted coups, and bombings inside Western countries.
A broad group of Western government agencies from countries including the US, the UK, Ukraine, Australia, Canada, and five European countries on Thursday revealed that a hacker group known as Cadet Blizzard, Bleeding Bear, or Greyscale—one that has launched multiple hacking operations targeting Ukraine, the US, and other countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—is in fact part of the GRU's Unit 29155, the division of the spy agency known for its brazen acts of physical sabotage and politically motivated murder. That unit has been tied in the past, for instance, to the attempted poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal with the Novichok nerve agent in the UK, which led to the death of a bystander, as well as another assassination plot in Bulgaria, the explosion of an arms depot in the Czech Republic, and a failed coup attempt in Montenegro.
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