Backed by the authorities, Russian cybercriminals used Bitcoin to cover up their activities, the prosecution says. According to an indictment published today, the cryptographic currency was used to conceal the "infrastructure" critical to their activities, including servers and domain names.
According to CoinDesk, the charge was filed against six hackers, whose victims are believed to count in "thousands. These include firms, political campaigns, governments and the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. According to the prosecution, the hackers were attributed to the military unit 74455.
U.S. authorities also claim that these hackers are behind the attack of the extortionist program NotPetya in 2017, which caused billions of dollars in damage. Cyber security experts had previously come to the same conclusion.
"Even after receiving a ransom ($300 in bitcoin), the attackers could not decrypt and recover the victims' computer files," the document says.
In September, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control included three Russians on its sanctions lists, also called the "troll factory" by employees of the Internet Research Agency, and the cryptographic addresses attributed to them.