The US State Department has announced a reward amounting up to 10 million dollars for the information about six presumably Russian intelligence agents accused by the US authorities of involvement in the 2017 NotPetya virus hacker attacks.
The announcement states that the reward is intended for anyone who can provide information to help identify and locate any of the people who, acting under command or on behalf of foreign nation-states, participated in attacks on objects of the US critical infrastructure.
The notification specifies that the wanted people are the members of a hacker group known as Sandworm Team, Telebots, Iron Viking, and Voodoo Bear. DC ties the named groups with the infection of computers in the US and other countries with the malware known as NotPetya on June 17, 2017.
Earlier, the FBI has made statements about the hackers’ increased attention to American companies from the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to information from the Bureau, presumed Russian hackers scanned the networks of five American energy companies and at least 18 US financial and defense-related companies.
Although the US authorities don’t have any direct evidence of Russian threat actors committing an attack on the US, US President Joe Biden said on March 18 that Russia would most likely use its cyber warfare tools, but it was still exploring an attack.
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States’ war on ransomware has gained features of the international cyber-war. The US has decisively joined forces with European law enforcement to seize servers of Hydra in Germany and arrest the RaidForums administrator Diogo Santos Coelho in Britain. Hydra, the Russian-language darknet black market, and RaidForums, one of the world’s largest hackers’ forum, stopped working.
RELATED: CISA and several other US agencies has made a joint warning about the nation-state threat actors jeopardizing American energy industry using PIPEDREAM malware.
