The US Division of State this week introduced rewards of as much as $10 million for info on three Russian Federal Safety Service (FSB) officers.
In keeping with the federal government, the three, Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov, and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, conspired to hack into the networks of a whole lot of power firms within the US and overseas.
The aim of the assaults, the State Division says, was to allow “the Russian authorities to disrupt and harm such amenities”.
The three officers and their co-conspirators “focused greater than 380 overseas energy-sector firms in 135 international locations,” the division notes on its Rewards for Justice web site.
The suspects, members of the FSB’s Middle 16 unit, focused American and overseas oil and gasoline companies, nuclear energy vegetation, renewable power companies, utility and electrical grid entities, consulting and engineering teams, and superior expertise firms.
In August 2021, Akulov, Gavrilov, and Tyukov had been indicted within the US with substantive expenses of pc fraud and abuse, wire fraud, and aggravated id theft.
In keeping with the indictment, they focused power firms as a part of the Dragonfly marketing campaign that concerned acquiring persistent entry to sufferer networks and infecting them with the Havex malware, by way of provide chain compromise.
Within the second section of the marketing campaign, known as Dragonfly 2.0, the three allegedly focused over 3,300 customers at greater than 500 US and worldwide firms and entities, together with US authorities companies, in spear-phishing assaults.Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
In August 2025, the FBI warned that FSB’s Middle 16 unit, tracked inside the cybersecurity group as Berserk Bear, Blue Kraken, Citadel, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Koala Staff, has been focusing on previous vulnerabilities in Cisco networking gadgets.
Cisco, which attributed the exercise to Static Tundra, a sub-group inside the state-sponsored APT referred to as Energetic Bear, stated the first focus of the assaults was to determine persistent entry and harvest configuration info.
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