Microsoft Corporation suspects a group of hackers, allegedly operating under the auspices of Russian intelligence, of increasing the number of cyberattacks in order to obtain confidential information. This was announced on October 24 in a corporate blog by Microsoft’s vice president of customer security Tom Burt.
According to the expert, we are talking about Nobelium, a group that the US authorities and Microsoft previously accused of attacks on companies working in the digital and financial sectors, government agencies, as well as non-governmental and research organizations in 36 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Bert noted that Nobelium stepped up their cyberattacks this summer: in less than four months from July 1 to October 19, Microsoft recorded more than 22,800 such attacks against 20,500 in the previous three years. Only a few attempts have been successful, the report says. According to the company, the networks of more than 140 enterprises were attacked, and in 14 cases the attackers managed to penetrate someone else’s network not through software vulnerabilities, but using simple methods such as phishing or guessing passwords.
“Nobelium is trying to replicate the approach they have taken with past attacks by targeting organizations that are integral to the global digital supply chain. This time they are attacking another part of the supply chain: resellers and other technology service providers who customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers, ”Burt said.
Previously, Microsoft called Nobelium the author of a large-scale hacker attack on US government networks, which became known at the end of 2020, using a hack of software from SolarWinds, a Microsoft contractor. The United States accused the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of involvement in the attack. In Moscow, the accusations of organizing cyber attacks are denied and called unsubstantiated. According to the head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, such methods could have been used by American and British intelligence.
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