GRU hackers marauding, Dutch let them go home

     The travellers were thirty- and forty-something Russian diplomats.  At least, that is what their passports said.  Clearly they were on a mission of some kind; a tie-wearing official from Russia’s embassy in the Netherlands came to the airport to greet them.  But the precise reason for their trip from Moscow to Holland was unknown.

  In fact the group were not tourists, as they would later meekly claim.  They had a lot of cash for breezy sightseers from Moscow: $20,000 and €20,000, sorted into crisp hundred-dollar bills.

  The most spectacular evidence was retrieved from seized cellphones and a camera….

  In December 2017 Serebriakov flew to Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur.  He stayed at the Grand Millennium hotel. Dutch prosecutors say he was targeting Malaysia’s chief prosecutor and police.  They were investigating MH17, the Malaysian airliner shot down in the summer of 2014 in eastern Ukraine by a Buk anti-aircraft missile.  The launcher came from Russia, Dutch investigators believe.  

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/how-russian-spies-bungled-cyber-attack-on-weapons-watchdog

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10-5-18     Russian’s BBC office reports that a person under the name of

Evgeny Mikhailovich Serebryakov is credited as an author of a scholarly paper on cryptography issued in 2014 by the Centre for special studies of the RF Ministry of Defense, member of GRU 85 Main Special Service Center…

  Beginning November 2014 and up through August 2016, Ermakov and his accomplices attacked a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company - the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, as well as USADA and WADA.

https://en.crimerussia.com/gromkie-dela/hacking-secret-services-ransomware-and-cyberattacks-details-emerged-of-accusations-of-7-russians-bro/

  Dutch counter-intelligence/government let Morenets, Serebryakov, Ermakov and Badin go back to Moscow, having caught them in position to hack a chemical weapons watchdog (OPCW) in April 2018 on Dutch soil.

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9-6-18  On the whole, the GRU specializes in military-political secrets and in the more daring and dangerous of operations, especially in under-controlled spaces, from the Middle East and the Balkans to cyberspace. The more urbane spies of the SVR and the political technologists and disruptors of the FSB represent every bit as much a challenge for the West.   https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/theres-more-to-russian-espionage-than-the-gru-op-ed-62800

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3-1-17   It’s the GRU that does all the real information war”  -Michael Kofman, a Russia security analyst at the Virginia-based CNA think tank.

https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/welcome-to-russian-psychological-warfare-operations-101-57301

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5-27-16     Russian opposition activist

Dmitry Nekrasov has fled the country after hearing he was to be arrested on charges of financing extremism and terrorism.     https://themoscowtimes.com/news/opposition-activist-flees-russia-after-threat-of-arrest-53059

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