Enigmatic Russian Hacker Alisa S, Now On U.S. Blacklist

A profile of enigmatic Russian cyber-expert Alisa Shevchenko, in the New York Times. “I am a human being. Part misfit, part mishacker,” she says on what appears to be her website. The company she founded is said to be a “supplier” to the Russian military group that is behind the hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee and has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control. She scoffs at that and says she has already closed the company down. The profile of Ms. Shevchenko is reminiscent of another profile that appeared in the Times in what seems like another era, back in late September when some suspected that Russians had hacked into voting systems in Arizona and Illinois. The alleged culprit then, a 26-year-old Siberian entrepreneur and snowboarder who had a business called King Servers that owned servers in California, acknowledged it was possible that hackers had used them, and joked that if they did he was going to send a bill to Putin and Trump. In a story that gets more convoluted and politically charged with every turn, a quote from Anton M. Shingarev, a vice president at the Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, has the ring of being on solid ground. “The fact is, the Russian system of mathematical education is quite good,” he told the Times. “And it produces a lot of computer programmers. And this is the reason why there are a lot of Russian hackers.”