This past spring, Dutch authorities discovered two suspected Russian spies plotting to hack into the lab that was analyzing samples from the Sergei and Yulia Skripal nerve agent poisoning and kicked them out of the Netherlands.
When the alleged spies were detained in The Hague, they allegedly had equipment with them that could be used to breach the computer network at Spiez Laboratory, according to reports.
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The laboratory—which provides “services relating to arms control, protection measures, health and incident management for international organizations, authorities and the general population,” according to its website—previously confirmed British officials’ claim that the Skripals had been attacked with Novichok, a “military-grade” chemical that targets the nervous system, according to The Guardian.
The lab was also reportedly used to analyze samples of chemicals used by President Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Syria. As well as being named by Britain as “ultimately responsible” for the Salisbury chemical-weapons attack, President Putin has been a powerful ally and defender of Assad despite his use of the banned weapons.
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According to Swiss officials, the lab was hit by Kremlin-linked hackers in June, as well as the effort by the two suspected Russian spies earlier in the year.
The men were arrested in an operation that involved Dutch, Swiss, and British intel agencies, an official confirmed to The Daily Beast.
Swiss intel spokeswoman Isabelle Graber said in an email to The Daily Beast that “the Swiss authorities are aware of the case of Russian spies discovered in The Hague and expelled from the same place.”
“The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) participated actively in this operation together with its Dutch and British partners,” Graber also wrote. “The FIS has thus contributed to the prevention of illegal actions against a critical Swiss infrastructure.”
“We had several indications that there were some hacking attempts during the last few months,” Andreas Bucher, a Spiez spokesman told Bloomberg News. “But we were not compromised.”
The Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection said in June that the Spiez laboratory had been targeted by hackers said to be from the Russian government-affiliated group Sandworm. It is not clear whether the expulsion of the two spies from the Netherlands was linked.
The Sandworm hackers posed as the laboratory’s organising committee and circulated a document with instructions for a forthcoming conference on chemical weapons in September. They then targeted chemical weapons experts who had been invited to the conference and opened the document.
“Someone posed as the Spiez laboratory,” Kurt Münger, of the Federal Office for Civil Protection, said at the time. “We immediately informed the conference invitees that the document was not ours and pointed to the danger. The laboratory itself has not registered any outflow of data.”
In an interview with the Russian TV channel RT, two men identified as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who have been accused by the UK government of poisoning the Skripals, admitted they had visited Switzerland on a number of occasions.
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In a statement, the Russian embassy in Switzerland neither confirmed nor denied the arrests. The embassy called the reports “fabrications” and said it “would not qualify attempts to stir up Russophobic sentiment.”
Dutch expelled Russians over alleged novichok lab hacking plot (The Guardian)
Russians Were Caught Trying to ‘Hack Swiss Lab Testing Novichok’ Used in Salisbury Attack (The Daily Beast)