Russian hackers haven’t eased up, cyber firm says

Company that exposed SolarWinds intrusions points to ongoing theft of data

WASHINGTON — The elite Russian state hackers behind last year’s 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.

On the anniversary of the public disclosure of the SolarWinds intrusions, Mandiant said the hackers associated with Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency continued 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 quite 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,” he said, complicating damage-assessment.

The Russian cyber spying unfolded, as always, mostly in the shadows as the U.S. government was consumed in 2021 by a separate, eminently “noisy” and headline-grabbling cyber threat — ransomware 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.

Mandiant tips its hat to Microsoft’s threat researchers in the report.

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 said unspecified “diplomatic entities” that received malicious phishing emails were among the targets.

The SolarWinds hack exploited vulnerabilities in the software supply chain system and went undetected for most of 2020 despite compromises at a broad swath of federal agencies and dozens of companies, primarily telecommunications and information technology providers and including Mandiant and Microsoft.

The Biden administration imposed sanctions last April in response to the hack, including against six Russian companies that support the country’s cyber efforts.