US Indicts Sandworm, Russia's Most Destructive Cyberwar Unit

NEARLY HALF A decade ago, the Russian hackers known as Sandworm hit Western Ukraine with the first-ever cyberattack to cause a blackout, an unprecedented act of cyberwar that turned off the lights for a quarter million Ukrainians. They were just getting started. From there Sandworm embarked on a years-long spree of wantonly destructive attacks: another blackout attack on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in 2016, the release of the NotPetya worm in 2017 that spread globally from Ukraine to cause $10 billion in damage, and a cyberattack that temporarily destroyed the IT backend of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, among others.

Yet in spite of crossing every red line the cybersecurity world has tried to draw to protect civilian critical infrastructure from catastrophic hacking, Sandworm's members had never been charged or even officially named in connection with those attacks. Until now.