Thread by @bellingcat

The U.S. Justice Department charged six Russians with hacking charges last week, accusing them of working for the GRU. Turns out, three of these hackers registered their car to the same imaginary apartment in Moscow... along with 46 other people.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Vehicle registration databases for the Moscow oblast leak regularly, making it easy to check residential data. If you search for three of these hackers, you see that they "live" at Svobody 21, apartment V (В in Russian). The problem: this apartment doesn't exist.

Svobody 21 is the address of military unit 74455 -- the GRU hacking unit involved in a number of high-profiled cyberattacks, including against the OPCW, Macron campaign, and others. 49 Russians registered their vehicles to apartments В and ВЧ (short for "military unit").

The demographics for these 49 people is about what you'd expect for a bunch of GRU hackers: 38 men, 11 women, and all born between 1978 and 1998. Average age -- 32 years old.

This isn't some super-crowded communal apartment -- it's common for Russian soldiers and intel officers to register their vehicles to their workplace. We saw the same thing with 305 (!) people registering their addresses to other known GRU addresses: bellingcat.com/news/2018/10/0…

Other than the three hackers indicted last week, none of the other (46) people who registered their vehicles to a non-existent apartment housed in the same building as a GRU hacking unit have been named in any public record we can find as GRU officers or hackers.

One of the other six hackers -- Yury Andrienko -- didn't register to Svobody 21. Instead, he picked Khoroshevskoe 76B... the headquarters of the GRU. One of the Skripal poisoners, Alexander Mishkin, also listed this as his home address.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…