CrowdStrike’s fingering of the GRU helps to deepen the public’s understanding of how different arms of the Russian government are carrying out malicious and deeply troubling cyber acts in the United States. The director of national intelligence and the homeland security secretary in October publicly blamed the Russian government for interfering in the U.S. election, including through hacks of political organizations and targeting of state election systems.
After the election, the CIA and other intelligence agencies concluded that one of Russia’s aims was to help President-elect Donald Trump win the election through a campaign of “active measures” or influence operations that included the hacking and dumping of emails onto public websites.
The GRU, evidently, was key to this operation.
“The GRU is used for both tactical intelligence collection in the battlefield in support of Russian military operations and also strategic active measures or psychological warfare overseas,” said Alperovitch, who is an expert on Russia and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The fact that they would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling.”
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