Russia's Cyber Attacks Grow More Brazen
Russia has ramped up cyber attacks against the United States to an unprecedented level since President Obama imposed sanctions last year on President Putin's government over its intervention in Ukraine.
The emboldened attacks are hitting the highest levels of the US government, according to reports, in what former officials call a “dramatic” shift in strategy.
The efforts are also targeting a wide array of US businesses, pilfering intellectual property in an attempt to level the playing field for Russian industries hurt by sanctions.
“They're coming under a lot of pressure from the sanctions — their financial industry, their energy industry” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which monitors critical infrastructure attacks. “And they're obviously trying to leverage cyber intrusion and cyber espionage to compensate for that.”
Crowdstrike has recorded over 10,000 Russian intrusions at companies worldwide in 2015 alone. That’s a meteoric rise from the “dozens per month” that Alperovitch said the firm noted this time last year, just as the US was imposing its sanctions.
Many see the recent reports that Moscow infiltrated the State Department and White House networks, giving them access to President Obama’s full schedule, as a turning point in Russian government hacking.
Moscow doesn’t care as much about being caught, perhaps in an attempt to prove its cyber prowess, some speculate.
Last year, Russians were charged with hacking into Nasdaq, America’s second largest stock exchange. Going further back, a notorious Russian Internet gang made off with tens of millions of dollars from Citibank in 2009.
On the government-sponsored side, researchers at security firm FireEye discovered evidence of Russian intelligence-gathering cyber campaigns stretching back to at least 2007. Moscow was searching for communications, emails, memos, phone calls and schedules that could smear adversaries’ reputations or simply shed light on their plans.
President Obama repeatedly asked his advisors whether a massive data breach at JPMorgan last fall was Russian retaliation for the sanctions, according to reports. The aides couldn’t give the president a definitive answer. Indeed, the security community is not united in its belief Russia was behind the attack.
