Saturday, January 13, 2018

Russian Weasels (Ласка): GRU Hackers Back in Full Force Hitting the U.S. Senate



Updated from the Hill here: Their back and apparently with a vengeance: Russian hackers hit the Senate with this pretty startling headline:

"Russia-linked hackers targeting U.S. Senate"

A few specifics: Russian hackers from the group known as “Fancy Bear” are targeting the Senate with a new espionage campaign, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.

The Tokyo-based cybersecurity group tells The Hill that it has discovered a chain of suspicious-looking websites set up to look like the Senate’s internal email system, and learned that the sites were being operated as part of an email-harvesting operation.

The websites were reportedly set up by Fancy Bear, a group linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the *GRU. The group has been implicated in the hack of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

* Notes on the GRU: The official name definition is: “Main Intelligence Directorate,” (the transliteration is: Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye (GRU).  It is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia.

Noteworthy on their Worldwide Ops: In 1997 it deployed six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR (the successor of the KGB and its foreign operations directorate.

The Associated Press first reported Trend Micro's findings.

Breaking story – more to follow I am sure – thanks for stopping by and stay tuned.

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