Feds Charge 16 Russians Allegedly Tied to Botnets Used in Ransomware, Cyberattacks, and Spying

WIRED

22-05-2025

May 22, 2025 3:56 PM A new US indictment against a group of Russian nationals offers a clear example of how, authorities say, a single malware operation can enable both criminal and state-sponsored hacking. Photo-Illustration:The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.
The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ's announcement of the charges describes the group as 'Russia-based,' and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.
Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also describes a second variant of the malware that it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. 'Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,' US Attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.
Since 2018, DanaBot has infected millions of computers around the world, initially as a banking trojan designed to steal directly from those PCs' owners with modular features designed for credit card and cryptocurrency theft. Because its creators allegedly sold it in an 'affiliate' model that made it available to other hacker groups for $3,000 to $4,000 a month, however, it was soon used as a tool to install different forms of malware in a broad array of operations, including ransomware. Its targets, too, quickly spread from initial victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia to US and Canadian financial institutions, according to an analysis of the operation by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.
At one point in 2021, according to Crowdstrike, Danabot was used in a software supply chain attack that hid the malware in a javascript coding tool called NPM with millions of weekly downloads. Crowdstrike found victims of that compromised tool across the financial services, transportation, technology, and media industries.
That scale and the wide variety of its criminal uses made DanaBot 'a juggernaut of the e-crime landscape,' according to Selena Larson, a staff threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.
More uniquely, though, DanaBot has also been used at times for hacking campaigns that appear to be state-sponsored or linked to Russian government agency interests. In 2019 and 2020, it was used to target a handful of Western government officials in apparent espionage operations, according to the DOJ's indictment. According to Proofpoint, the malware in those instances was delivered in phishing messages that impersonated the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a Kazakhstan government entity.
Then, in the early weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, DanaBot was used to install a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tool onto infected machines and launch attacks against the webmail server of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
All of that makes DanaBot a particularly clear example of how cybercriminal malware has been adopted by Russian state hackers, Proofpoint's Larson alleges. 'There have been a lot of suggestions historically of cybercriminal operators palling around with Russian government entities, but there hasn't been a lot of public reporting on these increasingly blurred lines,' says Larson. The case of DanaBot, she says, "is pretty notable, because it's public evidence of this overlap where we see e-crime tooling used for espionage purposes.'
Despite the operators of DanaBot remaining at large, the takedown of a large-scale tool in so many forms of Russian-origin hacking—both state-sponsored and criminal—represents a significant milestone, says Adam Meyers, who leads threat intelligence research at Crowdstrike.
'Every time you disrupt a multi-year operation, you're impacting their ability to monetize it. It also creates a bit of a vacuum, and somebody else is going to step up and take that place,' Meyers says. 'But the more we can disrupt them, the more we keep them on their back heels. We should rinse and repeat and go find the next target.'
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.