The United States announced on Tuesday that it was offering a $10 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of six Russian military intelligence agents accused of carrying out devastating cyberattacks on businesses around the world in 2017.
The six operatives of Russia’s military intelligence unit 74455 were indicted in October by a grand jury in a US federal court for their part in a series of cyberattacks, including some affecting Ukraine’s energy grid.
The US State Department accuses these individuals of being also involved in a computer attack in 2017 that targeted numerous companies around the world, and in particular damaged computers in hospitals across the United States, for losses estimated at nearly a billion dollars.
Given the high probability that the defendants are currently in Russia, extradition is not an option.
The Kremlin dismissed the accusations as a “Russophobic” campaign.
Russian military intelligence (GRU) is blamed for numerous cyberattacks around the world, some of which interfered with the 2016 US presidential campaign.
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