On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the US Department of the Treasury announced a new set of sanctions against tens of entities that are allegedly helping the Kremlin, including its cyber operations.
The war was never fought on the field alone, but in cyberspace as well, with Russia engaging in misinformation campaigns, launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and deploying disruptive malware against Ukrainian targets, including critical infrastructure.
Over the past year, the US and other countries have announced numerous sanctions on individuals and organizations that sided with Russia and, on Friday, the Treasury Department imposed new sanctions on 22 individuals and 83 entities.
[ Read: A Year of Conflict: Assessing Cyber Impact of Russia-Ukraine War ]
The sanctioned entities, the Treasury says, have been either providing Russia with material or technical support in the war, or helped it evade previously imposed sanctions.
The fresh sanctions target Russian banks, individuals and entities in the financial sector, arms dealers, organizations helping Russia procure technology and equipment, organizations in the aerospace sector, and more than 20 individuals and entities operating in Russia’s technology and electronics sectors.
Sanctions were imposed on 0Day Technologies – which the US describes as a cybersecurity consulting firm – for providing the personally identifiable information of Western citizens to Russian intelligence, and on Novilab Mobile, for working on mobile device monitoring technologies.
Forward Systems, R&DC, was sanctioned for providing software and algorithms to the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) for offensive cyber operations, while ZAO Akuta provided programming services to GRU.
Lavina Puls, Inforus and Andrey Igorevich Masalovich, who leads the two companies, were sanctioned for supporting GRU’s malign influence operations and for selling internet monitoring and influence technology.
The announcement comes just weeks after the US Treasury slapped sanctions against seven Russians accused of running the Trickbot cybercrime operation.
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