Russia used a cybercriminal’s botnet for a spying campaign

It’s no secret that the lines between state-sponsored hacking and cybercrime are fuzzy. After all, relying on professional crooks offers plausible deniability if the intruders are ever caught. However, it’s now apparent that those lines sometimes disappear altogether. The New York Times reports that Russian intelligence ‘piggybacked’ on criminal hacker Evgeniy Bogachev’s now-defunct botnet, GameOver ZeuS, to conduct spying campaigns in the US and abroad.