Chemical watchdog, MH17 probe: Russia is said to have targeted all

LONDON/THE HAGUE: Britain and the Netherlands accused Russia of running a global campaign of cyber attacks to undermine democracies, including a thwarted attempt to hack into the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog while it was analysing a Russian poison used to attack a spy.

In some of the strongest language used by the West since the Cold War, Britain said Russia was acting like a “pariah state”. The accusations were backed by other Western nations, including the US, which said Moscow must pay a price.

Russia denied what its foreign ministry spokeswoman called a “diabolical perfume co- cktail” of allegations by someone with a “rich imagination”.

The British and Dutch accusations were unveiled as Nato defence ministers gathered in Brussels to present a united front to their Cold War-era foe. “This is not the actions of a great power, these are the actions of a pariah state,” British defence secretary Gavin Williamson said.

Dutch security services said on Thursday they foiled a major "close access" cyber attack near the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and expelled four Russian men from the country in April.

Dutch officials said they had disrupted an attempt to hack into the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in April. At the time, the watchdog was probing the poison used to attack ex-spy Sergei Skripal in UK and chemical weapons that the West says were used in Syria by Russia’s ally President Bashar al-Assad.

According to the head of the Netherlands’ military intelligence agency, four Russians were caught with spying equipment and were expelled on April 13, Dutch Major General Onno Eichelsheim said.

Earlier on Thursday, Britain released an assessment based on work by its National Cyber Security Centre, which cast Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency as a cyber aggressor that used a network of hackers to sow worldwide discord. The GRU, Britain said, was almost certainly behind the BadRabbit and World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) hacking attacks of 2017, the hack of the US Democratic National Committee in 2016 and the theft of emails from a UK-based TV station in 2015. “The GRU’s actions are reckless and indiscriminate: they try to undermine and interfere in elections in other countries,” said British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Dutch defence minister Ank Bijleveld said Russia targeted the probe into the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board.

US defence secretary Jim Mattis said he agreed with the British and Dutch assessments. John Demers, US assistant attorney general for national security, confirmed that known attack targets included the OPCW, FIFA, Wada and Westinghouse.