Investigation Finds Lurk Hackers Had No Ties to FSB

Several years ago, after his arrest, the leader of the Lurk hacker group claimed that the hackers were acting on orders from the FSB and took responsibility for hacking the servers of the U.S. Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s email. However, a recent forensic examination of the equipment seized from the hackers found no evidence of attacks on U.S. government servers.

To recap, the arrest of members of the Lurk hacker group (over 50 people from 15 regions of Russia) became public in the summer of 2016. The hackers had systematically stolen large sums from the accounts of commercial organizations. At the time, experts from Kaspersky Lab released a detailed report on Lurk’s activities, which the company had studied for six years. The report revealed that Lurk members created the Angler exploit kit, which dominated the exploit pack market during those years.

After his arrest, Konstantin Kozlovsky, accused of stealing over a billion rubles (with three banks among the victims: Moscow’s Garant-Invest—467.4 million rubles, Metallinvestbank—67.5 million rubles, and the Siberian branch of Taata Bank—99.7 million rubles) and attacking critical infrastructure in Russia, stated in court that he committed the crimes at the direction of FSB officers. To add weight to his claims, he also took responsibility for hacking the U.S. Democratic Party servers and Hillary Clinton’s email in 2016. The court was skeptical of these statements, and the U.S. Department of Justice never named Kozlovsky as being involved in these attacks.

Now, according to TASS, citing a law enforcement source, the forensic examination has definitively disproved Kozlovsky’s claims.

“The examination was conducted by law enforcement together with leading Russian cybersecurity companies. All seized equipment, data storage devices, and communication tools were checked. No evidence of attacks on the U.S. government was found. These topics were also not discussed in the group’s seized correspondence,” the source said.

The source also added that the investigation found no connection between Kozlovsky and any FSB officers.

“If you look at his statements, they always follow major hacker-related news in the media, to which he tries to link his criminal case: first it was ‘Russian interference’ in the U.S. elections, then, when news broke about the arrest of FSB Information Security Center employees, he mentioned that as well. Even in the list published by the U.S. Department of Justice of those involved in attacks on American information resources, neither Kozlovsky nor other Lurk members are mentioned,” the source explained.