Month: August 2024

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Following more than nine months of unjust detention, American-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is adjusting to life in freedom with her family in Prague. While in Washington this week to receive an award, she tells VOA’s Liam Scott the fate of other political prisoners is on her mind. Camera: Cristina Caicedo Smit, Hoshang Fahim, Adam Greenbaum, Krystof Maixner, Martin Bubenik
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Washington — Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev says he saw no reason to be suspicious when he received what appeared to be an email from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a trusted contact with whom he communicates periodically.

“This letter was visually no different from his other letters. I believed that it was his letter because it was visually no different from his other letters,” Ponomarev told VOA Russian in a Zoom interview.

But this email from several months ago turned out to be one of numerous “phishing attacks” targeting U.S. diplomats and others that have been identified as the work of two cyber-espionage outfits linked to the Russian government. And the fact that it accurately mimicked McFaul’s previous messages indicated the attackers had already seen those earlier messages.

“The letter contained a reference to a report on Ukraine that McFaul supposedly intended to deliver in China, and also a request to check whether he had mixed something up,” Ponomarev said. McFaul did in fact deliver a lecture to Chinese students in April.

McFaul has confirmed to VOA that he was the target of a hacker attack but did not elaborate. The details of the attack were revealed in a recent joint report from the digital rights group Access Now and the Canadian research nonprofit Citizen Lab.

The report says the attacks were conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 by two “threat actors close to the Russian regime” known as ColdRiver and ColdWastrel.

According to The Washington Post, “multiple governments” have said that ColdRiver works for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, while ColdWastrel is believed to be “working for another Russian agency.”

Among their targets were exiled Russian opposition figures, employees of U.S. think tanks, former U.S. ambassadors to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, political figures and academics, employees of American and European non-profit organizations, and media organizations.

VOA has spoken with several of those named as victims, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a Russian journalist and a Russian human rights activist, as well as Ponomarev and McFaul.

The goal of phishing attacks is to try to get a user to click on a malicious link or enter their data – login and password – on a fake website. If the attack is successful, hackers gain access to the victim’s confidential information, including correspondence, contact lists and, in some cases, financial information.

Hackers conducting phishing campaigns employ a technique called “social engineering,” which a leading American cyber security software and services company described as using “psychological manipulation” designed to trick users into divulging sensitive information.

Herbst, who is currently director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told VOA that he has been facing attacks from Russian hackers for the past 10 years.

The Kremlin “didn’t like from the beginning what I was doing because I was pointing out that they’re conducting an illegal invasion of Ukraine, I guess going back to 2014,” he said.

Herbst said that Russian hackers target people who take a public position aimed at countering Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy: “So, it’s not surprising that people like Steve Pifer or Michael McFaul, or myself have received attention from the FSB, the GRU [Russian military intelligence] and others.”

Herbst added: “I don’t want to overstate the attention they give to us. You know, we are pretty much tertiary or even less than tertiary players on the international political scene, but they know they have such a massive security apparatus that they give some low-level guy the job of following people like me.”

“The stuff that linked me with Mike McFaul or Steve Pifer … was a fishing expedition, right? [To] see if they could get one of them to say something in confidence to me, which would be embarrassing.”

Steven Pifer did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the details of the hacker attack.

Ponomarev said that he responded to the fake McFaul email, but did not have time to download the malicious file attached to it since he was on a plane when he opened the email, and it was inconvenient to download the file from a phone.

“When I opened it on my computer, I noticed that the address he sent it to me from was not his usual Stanford University address, it was something completely different,” Ponomarev told VOA.

“Being an IT guy, I looked at the IP address of the file in the email and was convinced that it was phishing. After that, I passed the information on to the competent authorities so that they could look into the matter further.”

Ponomarev added that the fact the email ostensibly sent by McFaul came from a Proton service mailbox did not initially arouse any particular suspicions.

“I also have an address on Proton, for some kind of confidential correspondence,” he said, noting that attackers can forge addresses on Proton by changing one letter, so that visually it still looks like a regular mailing address.

“They use it because it’s completely anonymous,” Ponomarev added. “You can’t trace an IP address to Proton, so when you use Proton, it’s a dead end, you can’t excavate it any further.”

Polina Machold, publisher of Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet specializing in investigative journalism, told VOA that in the phishing attack targeting her, which took place last November, the hackers also employed social engineering and the Proton mail service.

“I received a letter from a ‘colleague’ from another media outlet, with whom we had previously done a joint project, asking to look at a new potential project or something like that,” Machold told VOA.

“We corresponded for some time, and when it came to opening the file, I discovered that something very suspicious was going on, because the link in the file supposedly led to Proton Drive, but the domain was something completely different.”

Machold said she called a colleague who confirmed that the attacker was pretending to be him. The information was passed on to Citizen Lab, which determined that hackers likely associated with the FSB were behind the attack.

Dmitry Zair-Bek, who heads First Department, a Russian rights group, said that a member of his group was among the first targets of a hacker attack “because we defend people in cases of treason and espionage.”

“One of our employees received an email from an address that mimicked the address of one of our partners,” he said. “The email contained a link that led to a phishing site.”

Zair-Bek added that the ColdWastrel group carried out the attack targeting First Department.

“They are the ‘C’ students of the hacker world,” Zair-Bek said of ColdWastrel. “The idea is the same as the ColdRiver group, they just paid less attention to some small details.

“The fact that they are ‘C’ students does not mean that they are less effective. They choose a person who from their point of view, on the one hand, has the largest amount of information that interests them and, on the other hand, is the most vulnerable.”

Even someone well-versed in digital security issues can fall for the bait of hackers, says Natalia Krapiva, an expert at Access Now, which co-authored the report on the Russian hacker attacks.

“The ColdRiver and ColdWastrel groups use quite sophisticated social engineering, a very good understanding of the context,” she told VOA.

“They know how the organization is structured in general, which people are responsible for finance, HR, politics, and so on. That is, they know which employee to send this [phishing] email to. They also understand with whom these organizations interact and on what issues.”

“We have seen examples of exploiting existing relationships between a Russian and an American human rights organization,” Krapiva added, noting that hackers knew that one of the organizations was waiting for a grant application and sent a malicious PDF file to the employee who was waiting for it.

This suggests that hackers already have a certain amount of information at the time they attempt to attack their victims, she said.
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WASHINGTON — Two men from Europe are charged in a plot to call in bogus reports of police emergencies to harass and threaten members of Congress, senior U.S. government officials and dozens of other people, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday. 

Thomasz Szabo, 26, of Romania and Nemanja Radovanovic, 21, of Serbia targeted at least 100 people with “swatting” calls to instigate an aggressive response by police officers at the victims’ homes, the federal indictment alleges. 

The calls also included threats to carry out mass shootings at New York City synagogues and to set off explosives at the U.S. Capitol and a university, the indictment said. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., handed up the indictment last Thursday. 

Online court records in Washington didn’t say if Szabo or Radovanovic have been arrested or if they are represented by attorneys. A court filing accompanying their indictment said investigators believed they were in separate foreign countries last week. A spokesperson for the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, declined to elaborate. 

Szabo and Radovanovic are both charged with conspiracy and more than two dozen counts of making threats. The plot spanned more than three years, from December 2020 through January 2024, according to prosecutors. 

“Swatting is not a victimless prank — it endangers real people, wastes precious police resources, and inflicts significant emotional trauma,” Graves said in a statement. 

Szabo organized and moderated chat groups to coordinate swatting attacks against 40 private citizens and 61 officials, including cabinet-level members of the federal government’s executive branch, the head of a federal law enforcement agency, a federal judge, current and former governors, and other state officials, the indictment said. 

In December 2023 and January 2024, Radovanovic allegedly called government agencies to falsely report killings and imminent suicides or kidnappings at the homes of U.S. senators, House members and elected state officials, according to the indictment. One of the calls led to a car crash involving injuries, the indictment alleges.
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Stockholm, Sweden — As China and Russia look to deepen cooperation in the Arctic, analysts cite concern about increasing geopolitical competition in the region, forcing countries to think more about how to respond to potential threats.   

Following a meeting between Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Moscow on August 21, China released an expansive communique outlining ways the two countries are boosting cooperation.  

On the Arctic, Beijing and Moscow pledged to strengthen cooperation in areas including shipping development, navigation safety, polar ship technology and construction.  

“Both countries will encourage their enterprises to actively engage in Arctic shipping routes cooperation based on market principles and pay special attention to the protection of the Arctic ecosystem,” according to the communique.   

Analysts say the latest announcement is part of Beijing and Moscow’s efforts to deepen collaboration in areas such as shipping, energy exploration and Arctic security.  

“China has invested in Russia’s energy projects in the Arctic, cooperated with Russia in shipping and infrastructure development, and conducted military exercises in the strategically important region,” said Patrik Andersson, an analyst at the Swedish National China Center.  

In July, the U.S. Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command revealed that it had tracked two Russian and two Chinese long-range strategic bombers that appeared in the skies off coastal Alaska. 

Since 2023, Beijing and Moscow have worked jointly to develop the Northern Sea Route across Russia’s Arctic coastline, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has said is “absolutely fundamental.” The two also signed a memorandum of understanding aiming to deepen maritime security cooperation between their coast guards.

Despite attempts to deepen cooperation in the Arctic, Andersson said there are still several friction points between Beijing and Moscow.  

“Russia has historically been wary of inviting China into the Arctic because Moscow views the region as its backyard,” he told VOA in an interview in Stockholm.  

“As the bilateral power balance increasingly shifts in China’s favor since the start of the Ukraine War, Russia is becoming more economically and politically dependent on China, which may force Moscow to consider strengthening cooperation with Beijing in some areas where it was previously reluctant to do so,” Andersson said.  

And while the recent joint aerial patrol near Alaska has attracted a lot of attention, Andersson said the scope of their bilateral military cooperation in the Arctic remains unclear.  

“It’s difficult to determine how much these exercises mean that they are really ready to establish a closer military cooperation in the region or whether they are mainly about posturing and deterring the U.S. and its allies in the Arctic,” he told VOA.  

Growing Arctic awareness  

Even so, analysts say some Nordic countries are becoming more aware of the potential threat China may bring to the region through its cooperation with Moscow.  

“[While] officials in Finland are currently observing the developments in the Arctic, there’s definitely a growing awareness about the potential threats or challenges that come with the growing Chinese presence in the region,” said Minna Alander, an expert on Arctic security at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.  

She said Russia remains the main driver of the militarization of the Arctic but China could pose challenges to Finland and other Arctic states because of more opaque strategies.  

“There’s always this suspicion that most of the research that China is conducting at its research station in Norway’s Svalbard is not purely for ‘the advancement of human civilization,’” she told VOA by phone.  

Regional experts note that Nordic countries have yet to come up with a set of strategies to cope with the potential challenges.  

“I think we are realizing the complexity of hybrid threats that could be posed by China and Russia [in the Arctic] but we haven’t developed a toolbox to cope with those challenges,” Patrik Oksanen, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum, told VOA by phone.  

He said economic ties with China complicate Sweden’s attempt to produce a strategic plan to cope with the new challenges.  

“There is an unwillingness to do something that could be interpreted as escalating the situation with China, but we will need to address the potential threats that China and Russia pose in the Arctic in a very short time,” Oksanen said.  

Ice pact 

Alander in Finland said she expects countries like Finland and Sweden, which became NATO members in 2023, to increase cooperation in the Arctic with other NATO allies. 

“Finland has an interest in developing relations with [other NATO members] in sectors such as security, economy, and trade, and Finland has gone all in on this transatlantic link,” she told VOA.  

In July, the U.S., Canada, and Finland announced a trilateral initiative, called the “Ice Pact,” to collaborate on the production of polar icebreakers.  

The Canadian government said the initiative recognizes the “joint priority of upholding safety and security in the Arctic, including the continued protection of long-standing international rules and norms.”   

In addition to increasing cooperation with NATO allies, Joar Forssell, a Swedish MP from the Liberal Party, told VOA that lawmakers from Nordic countries also are looking to deepen coordination on issues related to the Arctic.  

As NATO countries, along with Russia and China, look to increase cooperation with partners in the Arctic, Alander said the trend likely will lead to greater geopolitical tension in a region that’s long been free from global power struggle.  

“There used to be a slogan ‘High north, low tension’ [to describe the state in the Arctic] but unfortunately, it might be more like ‘high north, high tension’ in the future,” she told VOA. 
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