Same Russians Who Hacked DNC Helped Target, Kill Ukrainian Soldiers

by Ken Dilanian
Dec. 22, 2016

The Russian military intelligence agency that stole information from the Democratic National Committee this year also employed its hacking tools to pinpoint and kill Ukrainian soldiers in 2014, according to a report released Thursday by a cyber security firm.

The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry, a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News. The firm employs other veterans of the FBI and the National Security Agency, the government's digital spying arm.

Co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, who oversaw the research, told NBC News that the report is further evidence that "it wasn't a 400-pound guy in his bed," who hacked the Democrats, but Russian intelligence agencies. President-elect Donald Trump famously raised the possibility that the Democrats were hacked by an overweight man.

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In Thursday's report, Crowdstrike says Fancy Bear used a variant of the malware to learn the locations of Ukrainian artillery positions in 2014, when that country was battling Russian-backed separatists.

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