DISINFO: No evidence of Russian involvement in the SolarWinds hacking, US sanctions only want to cripple Russian tech competitors
SUMMARY
The Biden Administration just approved a new round of sanctions against Russia. The White House statement accuses Russian intelligence of being behind a massive cyberattack against US companies and government systems through SolarWinds. But the truth is that there is not a single piece of evidence pointing to Moscow. The operation wanted to gather data, the same thing that companies and other governments do, namely that of the US. Among the sanctioned entities are several Russian private companies, including Positive Technologies, a leader in data protection at a global level, which is accused of cooperating with Russian intelligence without providing more evidence than the mere claim. Positive Technologies was about to enter the stock market in Moscow, and it wouldn’t be the first time that the White House sanctions companies from other countries because they are competitors for the US.
RESPONSE
Pro-Kremlin disinformation denying any Russian involvement in the SolarWinds hacking in late 2020.
While it is always difficult to attribute responsibility in hacking attempts, multiple state-linked and independent researchers from all over the world have found clues and evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking. The FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US all concluded that Russia was behind the cyber-espionage incident, as did the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) of the UK. On January 2021, cybersecurity experts from Kaspersky discovered that the hackers had deployed malicious computer code tied to a hacking group known as “Turla”, widely suspect of operating on behalf of Russia’s FSB security service. On 24 February 2021, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith declared in a US Senate hearing that “substantial evidence” pointed to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, and to have found “no evidence” leading them anywhere else. In the same hearing, FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia also pointed that forensics were “not very consistent with cyberespionage from China, North Korea or Iran” but “most consistent with cyberespionage and behaviors we've seen out of Russia”. Other cybersecurity researchers reached similar conclusions.
The claim that US sanctions on Russian tech companies only want to get rid of competitors is unsubstantiated, aiming to deflect any Russian responsibility in the incident and portray Russia as innocent of any misdeed, a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative.
See other examples in our database, such as claims that the Navalny case is an outrageous fraud and an anti-Russian campaign, that sanctions on Russia are a pre-arranged scenario, that the alleged poisonings of Skripal and Navalny are Western provocations against Russia, that Washington’s frequent accusations about Russian interference in US political processes are all unfounded or that there is no evidence that Russia waged a disinformation campaign against Western coronavirus vaccines.
This disinformation message appeared in the same programme as the claims that “Biden copied sanctions against Russia from his predecessors, based again on ridiculous claims of interference” and that “Russia can’t be helping the Taliban; its experiences in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria prove that it is allergic to jihadists”.