The US Department of State this week announced rewards of up to $10 million for information on three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers.
According to the government, the three, Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov, and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, conspired to hack into the networks of hundreds of energy companies in the US and abroad.
The purpose of the attacks, the State Department says, was to enable “the Russian government to disrupt and damage such facilities”.
The three officers and their co-conspirators “targeted more than 380 foreign energy-sector companies in 135 countries,” the department notes on its Rewards for Justice website.
The suspects, members of the FSB’s Center 16 unit, targeted American and foreign oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants, renewable energy firms, utility and electrical grid entities, consulting and engineering groups, and advanced technology companies.
In August 2021, Akulov, Gavrilov, and Tyukov were indicted in the US with substantive charges of computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
According to the indictment, they targeted energy companies as part of the Dragonfly campaign that involved obtaining persistent access to victim networks and infecting them with the Havex malware, through supply chain compromise.
In the second phase of the campaign, referred to as Dragonfly 2.0, the three allegedly targeted over 3,300 users at more than 500 US and international companies and entities, including US government agencies, in spear-phishing attacks.
In August 2025, the FBI warned that FSB’s Center 16 unit, tracked within the cybersecurity community as Berserk Bear, Blue Kraken, Castle, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Koala Team, has been targeting old vulnerabilities in Cisco networking devices.
Cisco, which attributed the activity to Static Tundra, a sub-group within the state-sponsored APT known as Energetic Bear, said the primary focus of the attacks was to establish persistent access and harvest configuration information.
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