Security News > 2020 > July > EU Sanctions on Russian, Chinese 'Cyber Attackers'
The European Union imposed its first ever sanctions against alleged cyber attackers on Thursday, targeting Russian and Chinese individuals and a specialist unit of Moscow's GRU military intelligence agency.
The best known of the targeted entities is the Main Centre for Special Technologies, a unit of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - better known as the GRU. This unit, based on Kirova Street in Moscow, is said to have carried out attacks known as NotPetya and EternalPetya in June 2017, hitting EU private companies with ransomware and blocking data.
The sanctions list also accuses GRU agents of carrying out an attack on the Ukrainian power grid in the winters of 2015 and 2016, resulting in parts of it being shut down.
Four alleged Russian GRU agents - two "Human intelligence support" officers and two "Cyber operators" - are also named, for their roles in the April 2018 attempt to penetrate the OPCW agency in The Hague.
"With these sanctions, the EU is taking a big step towards safer cyber space. The price for bad behaviour is being increased, because the bad guys still get away with it too often," said Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok.