Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

Andrei Soldatov, one of the few Russian journalists and authors who has spent years investigating Russian intelligence agencies, told me that in the 1990s era of Russian cyberspying, Kremlin hacking and cybersecurity were dominated by an agency called FAPSI—the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information—that acted as Russia’s equivalent of the NSA. In 2003, FAPSI was cannibalized by its intelligence siblings, with most of its key roles falling to the FSB, one of several agencies created from the remains of the KGB. The result, as Soldatov described it, was that the FSB took over most of the Kremlin’s state-sponsored hacking for the rest of that decade. “When FAPSI merged with the FSB, they were put in charge,” he told me when I interviewed him in a hotel bar before his talk at PutinCon, a New York conference devoted to hosting the Russian president’s most outspoken critics. “On all levels, they defined the rules.”