I am getting tired of reposting this critical article done by one of the best Russian researchers....
Crimintern: How the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks in Europe
By Mark Galeotti
18th April, 2017
http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summ...orks_in_europe
In five recent US MSM articles there is finally the growing realization that Russia actively uses Russian overseas criminal gangs as hacking cut outs giving the Russian government a high degree of denialability when accused of being actively involved in hacking operations such as the election of 2016.
Currently under FBI arrest warrants in Prague and Barcelona are two of the top most Russian hackers that while charged under hacking and money laundering are being actively viewed as having been behind the DNC and Podesta hacks....both in paying for them and for running them....
The Russian hacker detained currently in Barcelona is being charged for running a major spam botnet behind the US influence operations.....
The Russian arrested under FBI warrant in Barcelona hacker was behind the Kelihos botnet alleged to have actually been the transfer system for the hacked DNC and Podesta email accounts...
FBI immediately took the entire botnet off line....
How the FBI Took Down Russia's Spam King—And His Massive Botnet
So to argue that Russia criminal gangs are not tied into Russian propaganda, disinformation and especially state sponsored Russia hacking is in fact rather strange...One of the world’s most notorious spammers appears to have been tripped up by a basic cybersecurity no-no, according to the FBI: He used the same log-in credentials to both run his criminal enterprise and also log into sites like iTunes.
The Justice Department announced Monday that it had successfully targeted a man prosecutors called “one of the world’s most notorious criminal spammers,” a Russian hacker known as Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, or “Peter of the North.” Levashov had long run the Kelihos botnet, a global network of infected computers that collectively flooded email inboxes worldwide with spam, stole banking credentials from infected users, and spread malware across the internet.
Spanish authorities arrested Levashov, who normally resides in St. Petersburg, Russia, while he was on vacation with his family. Rumors had swirled over the weekend, sourced only to a vague report on the Russian propaganda network RT, that he’d been involved in that country’s meddling with the 2016 US presidential election, but there was no hint of that in Monday’s Justice Department complaint, which focused instead on Levashov’s role in developing and running one of the internet’s most pernicious and longest-running botnets. Levashov's operation had infected as many as 100,000 computers worldwide, roughly five to ten percent of which were inside the United States.
It is again like standing in that dark tunnel waiting the train to hit you arguing all the while everything is going to be fine...it is not .....
For those that truly do not believe it....there is a true Russian cyber war....we have long ago left the realm of cyber attacks...ongoing in Europe and US and it came out of hiding shortly in the recent Ukraine cyber invasion as a warning to the West from Russia with love......
REMEMBER Putin's own words during his recent national press conference...quote "the US election attack could have been carried out by Russians who were dissatisfied by the way the West is treating Russia" end of quote.....
State sponsored angry Russians and or non state sponsored angry Russians...an interesting question....
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