May 28, 2021, 12:56 PM
Hackers linked to Russian intelligence services breached systems used by a leading U.S. aid agency to target other government agencies, human rights organizations, and think tanks. The move could ratchet up tensions between Washington and Moscow ahead of a highly anticipated summit between the two countries’ leaders. Cybersecurity experts say that cyberattacks by Russian hackers have become a daily occurrence.
The “wave of attacks,” first revealed by Microsoft Corp. in a blog post on Thursday, breached an email marketing service used by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to target around 3,000 email accounts at over 150 organizations across 24 countries, though the United States received a bulk of the attacks.
At least a quarter of the organizations targeted by the email phishing campaign worked on humanitarian, international development, and human rights issues, according to Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust. But the extent of the damage is still unclear. Microsoft believes the attacks are ongoing, though it noted that automated threat detection systems blocked most of the emails, marking them as spam.
Microsoft attributed the attacks to Nobelium, the same hacking group that engineered the recent SolarWinds hacks targeting U.S. government agencies, which are considered the worst cyberespionage breach in U.S. history. While Nobelium orchestrated the SolarWinds hacks, U.S. officials said that Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, was behind the operation.
The latest Nobelium attack, whether it amounts to a significant breach of U.S. government cyber infrastructure or not, shows that Russia has not been deterred by waves of retaliator ..
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