In November 2019, hackers from Russia gained access to the servers of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, as reported by The New York Times.
Russian hackers gained access to the company’s internal data right in the height of news about the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump, the newspaper reported.
- The impeachment process began because of suspicions that President Trump was pressuring the Ukrainian authorities to hurt his possible rival in future elections, Democrat Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The latter was a member of Burisma’s board of directors.
- According to a company Area 1, which recorded the attack, in this case, as with the emails of Hillary Clinton, a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U. and the Fancy Bear group used phishing emails to steal employee usernames and passwords. They set up several websites that copied internal Burisma authorization pages and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.
- According to The New York Times, it is unclear what information the hackers found or what they were looking for. “The timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment,” the newspaper said.
