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The sanctions, expected later this year, will be announced shortly after the German government announced that it “has evidence” that it was Russian programmers who mounted a cyber attack on the Bundestag in 2015.
This message was discussed on Wednesday by diplomats meeting in Brussels, who appear to have been considering programmers’ sanctions for a long time and are now making their choice public.
You want to send a clear signal
Secret attempts had been made until then, but the situation changed when German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in May that Berlin could not “simply ignore the arrogant attack.” Your government has asked the EU to take joint measures.
Photo by Scanpix / Angela Merkel
“German sovereignty has been violated. That is the important thing, and that is what Berlin wants to show,” said Chris Painter, a former US diplomat who worked in international cybersecurity under Barack Obama.
And since Germany is already winning sanctions, other Member States of the Community are likely to do the same.
According to Patryko Pawlak, an expert at the EU Institute for Security Studies, the capitals of the bloc “will want to take the opportunity to demonstrate that sanctions against other countries in the Community are worthy of sanctions”: “That would be a clear signal: do not go to our political institutions. “
Berlin’s target is the famous Russian programmer Dmitry Badin, who, incidentally, is also wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. USA, who he suspects was unauthorized interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
FBI / US FBI photo seeks Russian programmers, including Dmitry Badin
Criticism of Russian speech
Last week, the German Foreign Ministry announced suspicions that Badin had mounted a cyber attack on the Bundestag and that the country’s prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant against him.
“There are clear signs that he was a member of the Russian military intelligence GRU at the time of the attack,” said a ministry spokesman.
GRU actually has a division, a group of programmers in the West, known as APT28, Sofacy, and Fancy Bear. Badin is suspected of belonging to this team of programmers.
During the attack in May 2015, all the computers in the German parliament were suddenly turned off, and then the Bundestag had to completely redesign the IT security system.
Scanpix Photo / German Parliament – Bundestag
It is still unclear what data was stolen and, in general, if it was stolen, but the attack was extremely brutal, and the fact that the Bundestag was chosen as its target really annoyed Germany.
“This is very important to Merkel,” said Julia Schuetze, an analyst at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung in Berlin. “She has suffered, as have other members of parliament.”
GRU has a division, a group of programmers in the West, known as APT28, Sofacy, and Fancy Bear.
Germany has been organizing a response to Russian programmers in the West for several years, helplessly monitoring the cyber attacks that experts associate with the Kremlin. In February, the explorers of the EE. USA And several European countries condemned the Russian services for a cyber attack against the Sakartwell authorities.
That same month, French President Emmanuel Macron told security officials at a conference in Munich that he believed Russia “would continue to be the country to try to interfere” in the European elections. EU countries must be careful and “agree on sanctions”.
Reuters / Scanpix photo / Emmanuel Macron
As early as 2018, Western governments criticized Russia for various cyber attacks. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, for example, has been attacked, and British and American officials have little doubt that Moscow is responsible for the billion-dollar attack on the NotPetya virus, which has cost billions to world.
The process was hampered by a pandemic
The German initiative should again become a difficult challenge for the EU. Community sanctions mean an active freeze and travel bans, but this requires the unanimous consent of all members of the bloc.
It is true that discussions about the possible imposition of sanctions not only on Russian but also Chinese programmers started in early spring. But the process was hampered by a pandemic that absorbed all of the EU’s political energy.
Reuters / Scanpix Photo / Programmers
“The German federal government is firmly committed to the EU’s cyber sanctions regime (introduced last May, ed.). Cyber attacks must come at a cost. We believe there is sufficient evidence, so we are making an offer,” he said. a German diplomat to Politician.
Negotiations are likely to continue for several weeks, and it remains unclear whether sanctions will be sought only against those who contributed to the attack on Bundestag servers, or whether a broader package will be activated to apply restrictions to, for example, the entire Russian GRU service.
In January 2019, EU countries had already added the GRU chief and his deputy to the sanctions list for trying to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in Salisbury, UK.
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