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Andy Greenberg
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For weeks, evidence has been accumulating about the Russian military’s blatant war crimes amid its brutal invasion of Ukraine: mass graves, bombed hospitals, even makeshift torture chambers. some other branch of the Russian military is included in any rate of foreign war crimes: the Kremlin’s most disruptive and damaging hackers.
Last March, an organization of lawyers and human rights researchers from the UC Berkeley Law School Center for Human Rights sent a formal request to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It urges the ICC to commit war crimes. prosecutions against Russian hackers for their cyberattacks in Ukraine, even as prosecutors collect evidence of more classic and ongoing war crimes there. The Russian military’s intelligence firm GRU, and two of Sandworm’s most heinous acts of cyber warfare: the power cuts that hackers triggered by targeting electric utility companies. .
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The Berkeley group’s document sent under a Rome Statute treaty provision, which gives the ICC its authority, allowing recommendations from nongovernmental organizations. It calls on ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan to “expand the scope of his investigation to include cyber dominance in addition to the classic war regions (land, air, sea and area) given the history of the Russian Federation’s hostile cyber activities in Ukraine. “The report acknowledges that the tariffs opposed to Sandworm would constitute the first case of “cyber war crimes. “never filed through the ICC. But he argues that the precedent would not only help seek justice for those harmed by Sandworm cyberattacks, but would also deter potentially worse long-term cyberattacks that would affect critical civilian infrastructure around the world.
“Indeed, in the absence of significant consequences or accountability mechanisms, state-sponsored cyberattacks have intensified in the shadows,” reads the Human Rights Center’s Article 15 document sent to the ICC and shared with WIRED. “An investigation into Russia’s hostile cyber operations would shed light on tactics that few civilians know how to deal with. “
Lindsay Freeman, director of technology, law and policy at the Center for Human Rights, told WIRED that the ICC prosecutor’s office had responded privately to the group, saying it had won and reviewing the group’s recommendations. The ICC prosecutor’s office did not respond to WIRED’s questions for comment.
“An investigation into Russia’s hostile cyber operations would shed light on tactics that few civilians know how to deal with. “
Berkeley Center for Human Rights’ Letter to the ICC
Freeman argues that the ICC prosecutor’s office, which investigated the ongoing war crimes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with the governments of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania and the European law enforcement firm, will have to prove that its mandate includes cyberattacks that violate foreign law. of armed confrontation”. We’d like to make sure that they see cyber dominance as a genuine domain of war, because in this case, it actually is,” Freeman says. , not replace, the accusations of ongoing massacres, reckless killings of civilians and mass deportations to Ukraine. But he adds that “the only way to investigate and perceive this shock well is to see not only what is happening in the physical world, but also what is happening in cyber and data spaces, and this is not something that war crimes investigators have ever paid for. “Be careful. “
Since the beginning of Russia’s last primary invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Russia has attacked the country with a barrage of years of cyberattacks of a kind never before seen in history. GRU Sandworm hackers attempted 3 cuts in the country, at least two of which succeeded; destroys media networks, personal corporations and government agencies in targeted attacks; and in 2017 it launched the destructive and self-propagating NotPetya malware that inflamed many organizations in Ukraine and eventually many more around the world, causing record $10 billion in damage.
With the existing large-scale invasion introduced through Russia on February 24, the Kremlin’s state-sponsored hackers have introduced a vast new destructive hacking crusade against many Ukrainian targets, painstakingly coordinated with physical army tactics. This new dam included a cyber attack in which GRU hackers attacked Viasat’s satellite systems, cutting off broadband connections in Ukraine and Europe, adding those of thousands of wind turbines in Germany.
Freeman says that the UC Berkeley Center for Human Rights recommendations for war crimes charges, which were submitted to the ICC before some of the more recent cyberattacks were fully disclosed, distinguish the two attacks. Sandworm blackouts in 2015 and 2016 for legal and practical reasons – have already been very well investigated and pointed out to Sandworm hackers through government and private sector detective investigations. Six of the hackers in the group were indicted through the US Department of Justice in October 2020 with long histories including the outages. The cyberattacks occurred in the early years of Russia’s war in Ukraine, actively fighting in the country’s eastern region, which makes it less difficult to argue that they occurred in the context of an army standoff and thus constitute a war crime. They have a transparent civilian target, as there were no military operations taking up positions in western Ukraine or Kyiv at the time of the blackouts. And perhaps most importantly, they had a transparent and direct physical result, making the case that they were equivalent to the kind of physical attacks that war crimes tribunals have charged in the past.
“If you want to do it, now is the time. “
John Hultquist, Vice President of Intelligence Analysis, Mandiant
In the most sensible of all this, Freeman refers to the severity of Sandworm’s attacks on civilian force networks. In the 2016 incident in Kyiv in particular, hackers used malware called Industroyer or Crash Override to automatically trigger this force disruption. Although this disruption of force in the Ukrainian capital lasted only about an hour, an investigation of the attack in 2019 revealed that a component of the malware intended to disable security formulas was designed to cause the physical destruction of electrical appliances and only failed due to a misconfiguration of the malware. A cyber weapon that can interact with a genuine electrical formula or a commercial control formula and cause kinetic damage is incredibly dangerous,” Freeman says. , ‘No state deserves to attack critical infrastructure for civilians. ‘”
If war crimes fees can serve simply as a punitive measure capable of deterring these types of critical infrastructure cyberattacks, it makes sense to consider them opposed to an organization like Sandworm now, says John Hultquist, who heads risk intelligence at cybersecurity firm Mandiant and has followed Sandworm for much of the decade. even naming the organization in 2014. La Biden’s management warned that Western sanctions opposing Russia may lead the country to launch cyberattacks opposed to targets in the United States or Europe. “We want to do everything we can right now to prepare for Sandworm or deter them,” Hultquist says. “If you want to do it, now is the time. “
On the other hand, Hultquist, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, also questions whether cyber war crimes are a priority given Russia’s ongoing physical war crimes in Ukraine. “There’s a striking difference between cyberattacks and attacks on the physical ground right now. “says. ” You just can’t get the same effects with cyberattacks as when you bomb things and tanks roll through the streets. “
Berkeley’s Freeman that any ICC fee that opposes Sandworm for cyber war crimes deserves not to undermine his investigation into classic war crimes in Ukraine. the investigation and prosecution of war crimes in the Yugoslav confrontation of the 1990s, for example, took decades. Freeman argues that prosecuting Sandworm for the Russian cyberattacks of 2015 and 2016, on the other hand, would be “a fruit at hand,” given the evidence already accumulated through security researchers and Western governments about the group’s culpability. This means it may be offering immediate effects as further investigations into Russian war crimes continue. “A lot of what you want to see in this case is there,” Freeman says. “You can take this case to get justice, initially, while other investigations are ongoing. “
“Sandworm is frequently active and frequently executes serious attacks with impunity. “
Lindsay Freeman, Director of Technology, Law and Policy, Uc Berkeley School of Law Center for Human Rights
Sandworm hackers are already facing fraudulent fees in the United States. And last month, the State Department went so far as to factor in a reward of up to $10 million for data that could lead to the capture of the six hackers. But Freeman argues that the seriousness of condemning pirates as war thieves would have a greater deterrent effect and could also contribute to their arrest. He notes that 123 countries are parties to the Rome Statute and are obligated to help capture convicted war thieves, adding some countries that do not have extradition treaties with the United States, such as Switzerland and Ecuador, that may otherwise serve as a safe haven for pirates.
If ICC prosecutors were to bring war crimes charges opposed to Sandworm for his power-cutting attacks, the case would have to remove some legal hurdles, said Bobby Chesney, director of the Strauss Center for Security and International Law at the University of Texas School of Law. convincing the court that the attacks took place in a context of war, for example, and that the network of forces was not a target of the army, or that the attacks disproportionately affected civilians, he said.
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But the most basic concept of extending foreign war legislation to cover cyberattacks with physical effects, though unprecedented in ICC cases, is a simple argument, he says.
“All you have to do is ask, ‘What if the Russians had placed bombs in the electrical substations involved to the same effect?Is it a war crime? It’s precisely the same kind of question,” Chesney says. He compares the new ‘cyber dominance’ of war to other types of warfare, such as air and submarine warfare, which were once new modes of warfare, but no less subject to foreign law. “distinctions is a no-brainer. “
However, cyber dominance is another, Freeman says: It has no borders and allows attackers to immediately succeed around the world, no matter the distance. And that makes it even more pressing to hold Russia’s most harmful hackers accountable. “frequently active and frequently carries out serious attacks with impunity,” he says. “The threat it presents is incredibly serious, and it puts everyone on the front lines of this conflict. “
Correction 21:22 ET, May 12, 2022: An earlier edition of this article incorrectly claimed Cuba’s support for the Rome Statute. Cuba has not signed the statute. We regret the mistake.
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