He’s denying any role, but Russia’s spy chief said Tuesday he was “flattered” that U.S. and Western intelligence services believe he was able to pull off the massive SolarWinds computer hack of U.S. private and government networks last year.
In an interview with the BBC’s Russian service Tuesday, the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergei Naryshkin denied having a hand in the cyberespionage coup, saying claims by the Biden administration and others “read like a bad detective novel.”
Joking that he felt honored that Western intelligence services rated his team’s hacking skills so highly, Mr. Naryshkin said he could not “claim the creative achievements of others as his own.”
Exploiting a security flaw in a widely-used commercial software product, the SolarWinds hack first revealed in December eventually compromised nine U.S. federal agency networks and hundreds of private commercial networks as well.
President Biden last month expelled 10 diplomats and imposed sweeping new sanctions on Russia in response to the SolarWinds breach and to suspected meddling by Moscow in the 2020 presidential election. Among the nearly three dozen individuals targeted by the sanctions was Alexei Gromov, a deputy chief of staff in the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Naryshkin is known to be close to Mr. Putin, who worked for the FSB, the Soviet predecessor to Mr. Naryshkin’s agency, before entering politics.
The SVR director offered a sweeping denial of Western accusations about recent Russian behavior, dismissing as absurd charges that the Kremlin was behind the poisoning of Russian dissidents abroad, that it meddled in U.S. and Western election campaigns, or that it carried out government-sponsored cyberespionage of a major scale.
But the U.S. intelligence community and Britain’s lead cyber spying unit have both concluded that hackers linked to the Russian government were behind the SolarWinds hack.