The arrests caught the Russian hackers totally by surprise. One was at a Finnish border crossing. Another was arriving at an airport in Spain. A third was dining at a restaurant in Prague. Still others were at luxury resorts in the Maldives and Thailand.
Many have now turned up in U.S. courts. The long arm of U.S. law enforcement is spanning the globe like never before to bring criminal hackers to justice.
And it may not be just about crime. The Justice Department cites fuzzy and overlapping boundaries between criminal hackers and Russian intelligence agencies, the same ones the U.S. accuses of coordinating the hacking and subsequent disclosure of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
President Donald Trump dismisses allegations that Russia meddled in the election as “fake news,” but the FBI and congressional committees have launched probes and the Obama administration ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in late December.
The U.S. campaign leaves Russian hackers with a dilemma: If they leave the safe confines of Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, or Russia’s most ardent allies, they may get picked up and sent to the U.S.
“They no longer travel, the high-profile hackers. They understand the danger,” said Arkady Bukh, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City who has defended numerous accused Russian cybercriminals.