Russian hacking group targets home and small office routers to spy on users

British security officials found that a group linked to the Russian military is spying on users of compromised Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) routers in a broad cyber espionage campaign. A Microsoft blog goes into the technical details of these attacks. Read More …

Russian hackers target European firms with new spear-phishing cyberattacks

APT28, the infamous Russian state-sponsored hacking group also known as Fancy Bear, or Sofacy, has been observed targeting “specific entities” in Western and Central Europe with infostealers. In a newly released report, security researchers Lab52 from S2 Grupo detailed “Operation Read More …

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Russia-linked attackers are already exploiting Microsoft’s latest Office zero-day, with Ukraine’s national cyber defense team warning that the same bug is being used to target government agencies inside the country and organizations across the EU. In an alert published on Read More …

French government hit by cyberattack

The French Interior Ministry has confirmed recently suffering a cyberattack, but the consequences are still being determined. The French Minister of Interior said the attack took place at night, between December 11 and December 12. Email servers were compromised, allowing Read More …

German Government Summons Russian Ambassador Over Major Cyberattack

The German government has formally summoned the Russian ambassador following the attribution of a significant cyberattack and coordinated disinformation campaign to Russian actors. This development comes amid heightened concerns regarding interference in Germany’s political processes and critical infrastructure. According to Read More …

Global Russian hacking campaign steals data from government agencies

For years now, Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been eavesdropping on email communications from governments across Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. A new report from cybersecurity researchers ESET has found that the crooks were abusing multiple zero-day and n-day Read More …

Inside Water Barghest’s Rapid Exploit-to-Market Strategy for IoT Devices

There is a big incentive for both espionage motivated actors and financially motivated actors to set up proxy botnets. These can serve as an anonymization layer, which can provide plausibly geolocated IP addresses to scrape contents of websites, access stolen Read More …

Fighting Ursa Luring Targets With Car for Sale

A Russian threat actor Palo Alto Unit 42 track as Fighting Ursa advertised a car for sale as a lure to distribute HeadLace backdoor malware. The campaign likely targeted diplomats and began as early as March 2024. Fighting Ursa (aka Read More …

Analyzing Forest Blizzard’s custom post-compromise tool for exploiting CVE-2022-38028 to obtain credentials

Microsoft Threat Intelligence is publishing results of our longstanding investigation into activity by the Russian-based threat actor Forest Blizzard (STRONTIUM) using a custom tool to elevate privileges and steal credentials in compromised networks. Since at least June 2020 and possibly Read More …

TA422’s Dedicated Exploitation Loop – the Same Week After Week

Starting in March 2023, Proofpoint researchers have observed the Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) TA422 readily use patched vulnerabilities to target a variety of organizations in Europe and North America. TA422 overlaps with the aliases APT28, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Read More …