Evidence Emerging About Cyber Attacks On US Government
Hackers believed to be working for the Russian government have been reading internal email traffic at the US Treasury and Commerce Departments. Analysts at Kaspersky have now found evidence that suggests that Russia was behind the damaging widespread cyber attacks on the US referred to as 'Sunburst' and this investigation will likely reveal that many more hacks have been going on. The Moscow-based cyber security company has reported that some of the malicious code used recently in cyber-attacks on the US government is very similar code previously used by Russian hackers.
This clearly suggests that Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind the biggest cyber espionge attack against the government in years, affecting 18,000 users of software produced by SolarWinds, including US government agencies and some overseas locations. However, Kaspersky has cautioned that the code similarities do not always confirm that the same group is behind similar attacks as other groups can mimic and use similar coding.
According to some findings, Sunburst was used to communicate with a server controlled by the hackers and that this resembled another hacking tool called Kazuar previously associated with the Russian Turla hacking group, known for attacks on EU government institutions.
US intelligence agencies recently released a joint statement accusing Moscow of launching the attack, which they said was “ongoing” more than a month after being made public. Moscow has denied responsibility. Sunburst methods allowed the hackers to receive reports on infected computers and then they could attack those computers and take information and secure data from them. Of the 18,000 infected machines only, a few was highly targeted.
Kaspersky analysts found that functions that kept the malware dormant appeared to have links to Kazuar, which was reported by Palo Alto's Unit42 research team in 2017.
The Kaspersky investigators said there could be other explanations for the coding overlap besides Turla being behind the SolarWinds attack. It is possible the attackers were “inspired” by the Kazuar code; that both groups obtained their malware from the same source; that a former member of Turla brought the code to a new team; or that the code was used as a “false flag”, deployed in the attack specifically to attract blame against Turla and implicate Moscow.
FireEye has also uncovered a widespread campaign. The actors behind this campaign gained access to numerous public and private organisations around the world. They could focus on targets via trojanised updates to SolarWinds’s Orion IT software. This campaign may have begun as early as Spring 2020 and is the work of a highly skilled actor with the operation conducted with significant operational security.
Reuters: SecureList: FireEye: Unit42: Guardian:
You Might Also Read:
