New hack warning

The same Russian governmentaligned hackers who penetrated the US Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential election have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espionage campaign against the US Senate, a cybersecurity firm says. The revelation suggests that the group, often nicknamed Fancy Bear, is still trying to gather the emails of America’s political elite. ‘‘They are looking for information they might leak later,’’ said Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro who wrote the report. Trend Micro based its report on the discovery of a clutch of suspiciouslooking websites dressed up to look like the senate’s internal email system. The Tokyo-based firm then cross-referenced digital fingerprints associated with those sites to ones used almost exclusively by Fancy Bear. Trend Micro used an identical technique to uncover a set of decoy websites apparently set up to harvest emails from French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in April 2017.