Feb 14, 2022
Russia Sentences Man Who Claimed to Hack Clinton, RIA Reports
, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- A Russian court sentenced the leader of a hacking gang to 14 years in prison, RIA Novosti reported, bringing an end to a trial in which the man claimed to have helped the country’s security service to hack Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Konstanin Kozlovsky was convicted of organizing a criminal ring and large-scale fraud after the Lurk gang stole more than 1.2 billion rubles ($15.6 million) from December 2015 to April 2016 using trojan malware, the news service reported from the court in Yekaterinburg. Other members of the group received sentences of between five and 13 years, according to RIA.
Kozlovsky was arrested in 2016 on the charges and said during his trial that Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, recruited him to hack the Democratic National Committee, The Bell reported in 2017. He said his supervisor was FSB cybersecurity agent Dmitry Dokuchaev, who was subsequently convicted of treason.
A Russian investigation did not confirm his link to the Clinton hack, which resulted in the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks publishing about 20,000 of her private emails, RIA reported, citing an unidentified person in law enforcement in the Sverdlovsk region, where Kozlovsky’s hacking ring was based.
Clinton has blamed her defeat by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election partly on Russia’s interference. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied the Kremlin meddled in U.S. elections, though U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that it did. President Joe Biden imposed sanctions in April last year in retaliation for Russian efforts to disrupt the election, after warning Putin in a phone call that the U.S. would “act firmly” to defend its interests.
Russia this year has moved to shut down several cyber-crime groups. In January, authorities detained members of the REvil gang that was accused of leading a series of attacks, including one last May on plants in North America and Australia for meatpacker JBS SA, which eventually paid an $11 million ransom.
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