Vladislav Klyushin, arrested in the USA, has information about Russian interference in the American elections – Bloomberg

Russian businessman Vladislav Klyushin, extradited to the United States, has information about Russian interference in the American elections. Bloomberg reports.

According to the agency’s sources in the Russian and American power and intelligence structures, Klyushin is a Kremlin insider and even a year and a half ago received a state award from Putin – the Order of Honor.

Russian intelligence sources told the agency that Klyushin has access to documents relating to the Russian campaign to hack Democratic Party servers during the 2016 US elections. According to them, the documents confirm that the hacking was carried out by a group of GRU hackers known as “Fancy Bear” and APT28. In addition, some sources expressed the opinion that Klyushin has access to secret records of other high-ranking GRU operations abroad. All this could make Klyushin a useful source of information for the US authorities, especially if he asks for leniency in the court.

Another argument in favor of the fact that Klyushin possesses this valuable information for the United States is that his subordinate in the M13 company was a former ex-GRU employee Ivan Ermakov. In 2018, he was one of the accused of hacking into Democratic Party computer systems.

We will remind, on December 19, Switzerland extradited Klyushin to the United States. He is suspected of illegal trading in securities worth tens of millions of dollars. Klyushin is the head of M13, which developed the Katyusha media monitoring system for the Defense Ministry and the Presidential Administration. Klyushin also appeared in investigations of the Kremlin’s Telegram channels and sued the Proekt newspaper for mentioning it.

In 2017, The Insider managed to provethat the Fancy Bear grouping consists of members of the GRU military unit 26165. A year later, these data were confirmed by the US Department of Justice, officially putting forward accusations against a group of hackers. The most famous operation APT28 was the hacking of the servers of the Democratic Party in 2016, designed to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Then Trump did not hide that he was using information obtained from the hack for his own political purposes, and urged Russian hackers to post more letters to Hillary Clinton. Other APT28 cyberattacks include the White House (and other targets in the US), the Foreign Ministries of the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Norway, the Netherlands and other countries, the Ministry of Defense of Denmark, Italy and Germany, the Bundestag, NATO, OSCE , IOC, WADA, JIT, a number of foreign media outlets (including TV5Monde and Al Jazeera). The same group of hackers attacked dozens of Russian oppositionists and members of NGOs and journalists, including The Insider employees, which independently of each other confirmed four companies working in the field of information security.