Russian hackers are notorious for their dubious skills. According to an indictment published by the US Department of Justice, the Russian hackers who carried out the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign used Bitcoin to hack the US 2016 elections. They used more than $95,000 worth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fund their campaigns.
Indictment said that
“To facilitate the purchase of infrastructure used in their hacking activity — including hacking into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and releasing the stolen documents — the defendants conspired to launder the equivalent of more than $95,000 through a web of transactions structured to capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin”
Twelve Russian hackers working for Russia’s military intelligence GRU hacked into the U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Hackers then used Bitcoin to hide their identities as they borrowed servers in the US and Malaysia, registered website domains through which they released stolen documents, and purchased virtual private networks (VPNs) that masked their identity.
Indictment further said that,
“The Conspirators used several dedicated email accounts to track basic bitcoin transaction information and to facilitate bitcoin payments to vendors. One of these dedicated accounts, registered with the username “gfadel47,” received hundreds of bitcoin payment requests from approximately 100 different email accounts. For example, on or about February 1, 2016, the gfadel47 account received the instruction to “[p]lease send exactly 0.026043 bitcoin to” a certain thirty-four character bitcoin address. Shortly thereafter, a transaction matching those exact instructions was added to the Blockchain”
Russian hackers also mined their own bitcoin to use that money in different ways such as to pay a Romanian company to set up the website dcleaks.com using a payment processing company situated in US to show that the website had been set up in USA. After that, they used the website to release hacked information, falsely claiming that it had been set up by US hackers.
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