Russian Hackers Evolve to Serve the Kremlin - Wall Street Journal
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Russian Hackers Evolve to Serve the Kremlin
Wall Street Journal
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden said the Kremlin doesn't appear to be trying to influence the election's outcome, noting Russian involvement has provided fodder for both Republicans and Democrats. “They are not trying to pick ...
Wall Street Journal |
Russian Hackers Evolve to Serve the Kremlin
Wall Street Journal Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden said the Kremlin doesn't appear to be trying to influence the election's outcome, noting Russian involvement has provided fodder for both Republicans and Democrats. “They are not trying to pick ... |
Russian Hackers Evolve to Serve the Kremlin
Attacks on Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee are part of Vladimir Putin’s effort to sow instability, U.S. officials say
In doing so, Russia has transformed state-sponsored hackers known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear from internet spies to political tools with the power to target the country’s adversaries, according to U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts.
The attacks are the harder side of parallel campaigns in the Kremlin’s English-language media, which broadcast negative news about Western institutions and alliances and focus on issues that demonstrate or stoke instability in the West, such as Brexit. Moscow seeks particularly to weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has expanded its defense against Russia.
“The underlying philosophy of a lot of these attacks is about establishing information as a weapon,” said Alexander Klimburg, a cyber expert at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies. “Hacking for them is literally about controlling information.”
ENLARGE “Everyone is talking about who did it, but is it so important who did it?” Mr. Putin said. “What is important is the content of this information.”
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden said the Kremlin doesn’t appear to be trying to influence the election’s outcome, noting Russian involvement has provided fodder for both Republicans and Democrats. “They are not trying to pick a winner,” he said Tuesday at a cybersecurity conference in Washington. Rather, Russia is likely unleashing the emails “to mess with our heads.”
Pro-Kremlin commentators in Russia have seized on the DNC leaks to cast doubt on the American democratic process and argue that Washington has no right to criticize Moscow. They have said the hacked DNC emails, which showed party officials working to undermine primary runner-up Bernie Sanders, prove Americans are hypocritical when they malign Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism.
The White House has threatened a “proportional response” against Russia.
Another group, known as Cozy Bear or APT 29, has taken a lower profile, often targeting higher-profile individuals and uses more sophisticated tools to cover its tracks, cybersecurity experts said. It was active as early as 2008 and 2009, with targets related to Chechnya, a U.S.-based think tank and government institutions in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to security firm F-Secure Corp.
The methods are well known: Hackers trick targets into providing account information or downloading infected files through expertly faked emails and webpages, a tactic known as spear-phishing.
ENLARGE
The hacking on the Democratic National Committe has been traced by the U.S. to Russia. Above, the DNC’s Washington headquarters. Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Yet it is the groups’ selection of targets that offers the most compelling evidence of Russian involvement, cybersecurity experts say. Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear have generally focused on NATO and allied governments, officials in Eastern Europe, and Western defense groups, such as Academi LLC, the U.S. security firm previously known as Blackwater. In many cases, the information they siphon off aligns closely with Russian interests.
“This all adds up to a strong indication of Russian sponsorship,” said Laura Galante, director of global intelligence at U.S.-based security firm FireEye Inc. and a former Russia specialist at the U.S. Department of Defense. “The Russian government has very publicly stated its desire to have ability in this realm. They want the ability to shape the way people think about events.”
Fancy Bear’s early efforts were mostly unremarkable and under-the-radar, typical of state-sponsored actors, said Brian Bartholomew, a researcher at Kaspersky Labs. Targets included Georgia’s Ministry of Defense and Eastern European governments and militaries, according to FireEye.
But since around 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea set off a confrontation with the West, the group has expanded its activities, often in apparent response to news events. In that shift the groups combine traditional spycraft with the public impact of leaks such as those by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, who now lives in Russia.
Fancy Bear was behind the hacking alias CyberBerkut, cybersecurity experts said, in attacks that targeted Ukrainian ministries, its presidential elections and posted hacked documents online. The group has been linked to 2014 hacks of Polish government websites, spear-phishing aimed at U.S. and European militaries, the 2015 hacking of Germany’s parliament and other attacks in the West.
More recently, private security companies said that Fancy Bear was behind hacking of the DNC and the leaking of athlete information from the World Anti-Doping Agency in September. The leak following the Rio Olympics sought to show U.S. athletes got unfair prescription-drug exemptions just as some Russian athletes were barred from the Olympics over claims of systemic Russian doping violations.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
US Confident It's Blocked Russia's Hacking Paths - NBCNews.com
NBCNews.com |
US Confident It's Blocked Russia's Hacking Paths
NBCNews.com U.S. officials are confident that defensive measures put in place will stop Russia from hacking more emails to influence the upcoming election — for now. A high-level intelligence source said the U.S. and its allies have choked off cyber paths that ... and more » |
The world should brace itself for more physically destructive hacks, two senior cybersecurity officials said Wednesday, warning that a more dangerous era of hacking was already upon us. Paul Chichester, the director of operations at Britain's new National Cyber Security Center, told attendees at an event hosted by British defense think tank RUSI that electronic intrusions were on their way to becoming more “destructive, disruptive and coercive.” “That will be our future,'' he told a crowd of officers, academics and industry experts gathered for a two-day symposium in central London. Chichester was seconded by Air Force Lt. Gen. James K. McLaughlin, deputy commander at U.S. Cyber Command, who told attendees that infrastructure-wrecking attacks were being seen “right now in the environment.” Neither official went into specifics about what they'd seen or why they felt the threat was intensifying, although McLaughlin invoked a cyberattack in Ukraine which knocked out three separate power distribution companies last year. The Dec. 23 incident, believed to have been pulled off by a team of hackers using stolen passwords, left 225,000 people without electricity, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security bulletin published two months later. Cybersecurity experts long worried that hackers can hijack the vulnerable industrial control systems to wreak havoc in power plants, traffic systems, factories, dams or reservoirs. Still, publicly confirmed examples of real-world damage from hacking have — so far — been few and far between. The Ukrainian incident provided a rare and dramatic demonstration of the physical consequences of a well-organized cyberattack. McLaughlin said there was now no doubt such hacks were possible. “Three years ago these were just theoretical,” he said. “Now we see them. They're practically here in front of us.”
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Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia intend to triple their annual spending on arms and military equipment to $670 million by 2018 from 2014 thanks to fears of Russia after its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region, an HIS Markit report said Thursday. By 2020, it said, the combined overall defense budgets of the three Baltic republics will reach an estimated $2.1 billion, more than double what it was when the countries entered NATO in 2004 and the fastest such growth in any region worldwide. “We have seen political confrontation between Russia and the West in the past 2-1/2 years escalate to military assertiveness and we do not see this ending anytime soon,” said Alex Kokcharov, principal analyst in the country risk division of HIS Markit, a prominent research and analysis firm. “This confrontation will likely include elements of military intimidation, making immediate Russian neighbors concerned.” Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 after the outbreak of World War II, but regained independence when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and are now members of NATO and the European Union. The IHS Markit report, which gave no sources, said Latvia and Lithuania would account for the biggest increase in military spending through 2018. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Latvia and Lithuania agreed to increase military spending to reach NATO’s informal target of 2 percent of GDP by 2018, something that Estonia has achieved. The three Baltic republics each host detachments of about 150 U.S. soldiers, who were deployed immediately after Russia annexed Crimea. The Americans are augmented by occasional rotations of troops from other NATO allies. Deployments will grow to about 1,000 soldiers per country next year. Lithuania protested Russia’s transfer of nuclear-capable missiles to its western Baltic outpost of Kaliningrad this month, calling it an aggressive move against the whole of Europe. The Kaliningrad enclave is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, both NATO and EU members.
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 Wall Street Journal |
Russian Hackers Evolve to Serve the Kremlin
Wall Street Journal With the hacking of Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, U.S. officials say Russia has unleashed a strengthened cyberwarfare weapon to sow uncertainty about the U.S. democratic process. In doing so, Russia has transformed ... |
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ВЕСТИ Американский рэпер Эминем выпустил новую композицию "Предвыборная речь". В ней артист критикует Дональда Трампа - кандидата в президенты США от Республиканской партии.
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The west must recognise that the post cold war order is under attack
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A spacecraft from Earth has once again reached Mars. The European Space Agency said its Schiaparelli spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere on Wednesday, but there was still no word on if the probe had successfully landed. In a
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