Russian hackers haven’t eased spying efforts

WASHINGTON » The elite Russian state hackers behind last year’s massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign hardly eased up this year, managing plenty of infiltrations of U.S. and allied government agencies and foreign policy think tanks with consummate craft and stealth, a leading cybersecurity firm reported Monday.

Also Monday, Microsoft announced that it had disrupted the cyber-spying of a state-backed Chinese hacking group by seizing websites it used to gather intelligence from foreign ministries, think tanks and human-rights organizations in the U.S. and 28 other countries, the vast majority in Latin America.

Microsoft said a Virginia federal court had granted its request last Thursday to seize 42 web domains that the Chinese hacking group, which it calls Nickel but which is also known as APT15 and Vixen Panda, were using to access targets typically aligned with China’s geopolitical interests. It said in a blog that “a key piece of the infrastructure the group has been relying on” in its latest wave of infiltrations was removed.

The duel announcements, though unrelated, highlight the unrelenting drumbeat of digital spying by its top U.S. geopolitical rivals, whose cyber-intrusion skillset is matched only by that of the United States.

A year after it discovered the SolarWinds intrusions, Mandiant said the hackers associated with Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency continue to steal data “relevant to Russian interests” with great effect using novel, stealthy techniques that it detailed in a mostly technical report aimed at helping security professionals stay alert. It was Mandiant, not the U.S. government, that disclosed SolarWinds.

While the number of government agencies and companies hacked by the SVR was smaller this year than last, when some 100 organizations were breached, assessing the damage is difficult, said Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer. Overall, the impact is serious.

“The companies that are getting hacked, they are also losing information. Not everybody is disclosing the incident(s) because they don’t always have to disclose it legally,” complicating damage assessment, he said, .

The Russian cyber spying unfolded, as always, mostly in the shadows as the U.S. government was consumed in 2021 by a separate, “noisy” and headline cyber threat: ransom ware attacks launched not by nation-state hackers but rather criminal gangs. As it happens, those gangs are largely protected by the Kremlin.

The Mandiant findings follow an October report from Microsoft that the hackers, whose umbrella group it calls Nobelium, continue to infiltrate the government agencies, foreign-policy think tanks and other organizations focused on Russian affairs through the cloud service companies and so-called managed services providers on which they increasingly rely.

The Mandiant researchers said the Russian hackers “continue to innovate and identify new techniques and tradecraft” that lets them linger in victim networks, hinder detection and confuse attempts to attribute hacks to them. In short, Russia’s most elite state-backed hackers are as crafty and adaptable as ever.

Mandiant did not identify individual victims or describe what specific information may have been stolen, but did say unspecified “diplomatic entities” that received malicious phishing emails were among the targets.

Often, the researchers say, the hackers’ path of least resistance to their targets were cloud-computing services. From there, they used stolen credentials to infiltrate networks. The report describes how in one case they gained access to one victim’s Microsoft 365 system through a stolen session. And, the report says, the hackers routinely relied on advanced tradecraft to cover their tracks.

One clever technique discussed in the report illustrates the ongoing cat-andmouse game that digital espionage entails. Hackers set up intrusion beachheads using IP addresses, a numeric designation that identifies its location on the internet, that were physically located near an account they are trying to breach — in the same address block, say, as the person’s local internet provider. That makes it highly difficult for security software to detect a hacker using stolen credentials posing as someone trying to access their work account remotely.