For the first time, Europe punishes cyber criminals

The Council has targeted six people and three groups accused of being the perpetrators behind the cyber attacks known as WannaCry, NotPetya and Operation Cloud Hopper

(Photo: Getty Images) For the first time, the Council of The European Union has decided to sanction six people and three groups guilty of being the cybercriminals behind attacks known as WannaCry, NotPetya and Operation Cloud Hopper and against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPWC). The investigations carried out by the European institutions have found that the cyber criminals involved were connected to the Chinese, Russian and North Korean state authorities and, from this moment, it will no longer be possible for them to travel and will no longer be able to dispose of their assets as they are frozen by the authorities judicial.

The package of measures, born in 2017 and entered into force in 2019, allows the member states of the Union to adopt all those measures that fall under the responsibility of the Pesc (Foreign Policy of common security) to prevent and discourage IT activities to the detriment of the entire European community or of the individual nations that are part of it. According to these rules, the responsibility is individual and no state is to be considered as the instigator of these actions.

What happened?

To push definitively for the application of these sanctions were Germany which, as Politico reported, managed to locate the person responsible for the violation of the Bundestag's IT systems in 2015. After an investigation, it was discovered that he is a Russian hacker, Dmitriy Badin, also wanted by the FBI in the United States because he was involved in Russiagate during the 2016 presidential election.

And it is always a Russian computer scientist who led the attack NotPetya , which took place in Ukraine in 2017, and that has to crash the systems of large companies like FedEx. Behind them, there would be the Sandworm, a unit of the military intelligence service of the Russian (Gru). The chinese , on the contrary, the group, the Cloud Hopper, which, from 2014 to 2017, through an operation that is very sophisticated, has managed to come into possession of the secrets of some of the most important companies in the world. Among these, as written by Reuters , there would have been Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Ibm. In the attack WannaCry the hackers would be the source north Korean and belonging to a group known as Lazarus . That occurred in may of 2017, the operation has introduced malware into the systems of the National Health Service in the Uk, causing havoc among companies and government institutions.