Hacker Who Aided Russian Intelligence Is Sentenced to 2 Years
Among those whose email inboxes and mobile phones are said to have been penetrated are Natalya Timakova, the spokeswoman for Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister
and former president; Arkady Dvorkovich, a deputy prime minister; Andrei Belousov, an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin and a former minister of economic development; and Dmitri Kiselyev, the Russian government’s chief propagandist.
Mr. Anikeyev, a former journalist who led a collective known as Shaltai Boltai — Humpty Dumpty — until his arrest last November, admitted his guilt in illegally
gaining access to the private data of a number of targets, including high-ranking officials, businessmen and journalists, according to Russian news reports.
By LINCOLN PIGMANJULY 6, 2017
MOSCOW — After a two-day trial conducted behind closed doors, the Moscow City Court on Thursday sentenced Vladimir Anikeyev, the head of a hacking group
that the authorities cracked down on last winter, to two years in a penal colony.
That led to the arrest of Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy director of the service’s cybersecurity organ,
and one of several individuals arrested around the same time as the members of Shaltai Boltai and charged with treason, though the authorities never publicly linked the two cases.
The security service detained Mr. Anikeyev after luring him to Russia from Ukraine, where
he had lived for several years, with the promise of payment for a hacking operation.
Mr. Mikhailov’s possible ties to Shaltai Boltai emerged in Russian news reports.
