Hacker Who Aided Russian Intelligence Is Sentenced to 2 Years<br />Among those whose email inboxes and mobile phones are said to have been penetrated are Natalya Timakova, the spokeswoman for Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister<br />and former president; Arkady Dvorkovich, a deputy prime minister; Andrei Belousov, an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin and a former minister of economic development; and Dmitri Kiselyev, the Russian government’s chief propagandist.<br />Mr. Anikeyev, a former journalist who led a collective known as Shaltai Boltai — Humpty Dumpty — until his arrest last November, admitted his guilt in illegally<br />gaining access to the private data of a number of targets, including high-ranking officials, businessmen and journalists, according to Russian news reports.<br />By LINCOLN PIGMANJULY 6, 2017<br />MOSCOW — After a two-day trial conducted behind closed doors, the Moscow City Court on Thursday sentenced Vladimir Anikeyev, the head of a hacking group<br />that the authorities cracked down on last winter, to two years in a penal colony.<br />That led to the arrest of Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy director of the service’s cybersecurity organ,<br />and one of several individuals arrested around the same time as the members of Shaltai Boltai and charged with treason, though the authorities never publicly linked the two cases.<br />The security service detained Mr. Anikeyev after luring him to Russia from Ukraine, where<br />he had lived for several years, with the promise of payment for a hacking operation.<br />Mr. Mikhailov’s possible ties to Shaltai Boltai emerged in Russian news reports.
