Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions imposed as a result has led lawyers in the US to drop the now-sanctioned Alfa Bank and its owners, leading to the dismissal of the John Doe, BuzzFeed, and Fusion GPS lawsuits filed by Alfa Bank or its owners. That has, for now, brought an end to a sustained Russian effort to use lawfare to discover “U.S. cybersecurity methods and means” (as some of Alfa’s targets described the effort).
But the dismissal of the Alfa Bank suits hasn’t halted the effort to expose US cybersecurity efforts in the guise of pursuing right wing conspiracy theories. Both Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland and “online sleuths” goaded, in part, by Sergei Millian have picked up where Alfa Bank left off. In recent days, for example, documents obtained via a Federalist FOIA to Georgia Tech exposed the members of a cybersecurity sharing group,…
