Category Archives: UNC1151

Against backdrop of Russian-Ukraine war, researchers witness flurry of nation-aligned hacking

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Hackers believed to be associated with the governments of Russia, Belarus and China are targeting Ukraine, Poland and European governments, researchers say, ranging from espionage attempts to phishing campaigns and coinciding with the intensification of the Russian assault on Ukraine. Shane Huntley, the director of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), said in a blog post Monday that the group has observed well-known Russian military hacking group Fancy Bear (also known as APT28) conducting several large credential phishing campaigns targeting UkrNet, a Ukrainian media company. Two recent campaigns, he said, involved newly created Blogspot domains as initial landing pages, which then redirected targets to credential phishing pages. TAG also observed a hacking operation known as Ghostwriter, or UNC1151, running credential phishing campaigns over the past week against Polish and Ukrainian government and military organizations. Ghostwriter refers to activity believed to be operating out of Belarus, researchers with cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported […]

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NATO countries’ refugee management may have been targeted by Belarus-linked hackers

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A hacking group with a history of phishing attacks and disinformation against NATO nations may be using compromised Ukrainian armed service member emails to target European officials tasked with managing logistics around refugees fleeing Ukraine, according to findings published Monday. Researchers with cybersecurity firm Proofpoint report they detected an email Feb. 24 that carried a subject referencing the Feb. 24 emergency meeting of NATO on the day the Russian government began its military attack on Ukraine. The email included an attached Microsoft Excel spreadsheet titled “list of persons.xlsx” that the researchers later determined included malware that, if installed, sought to gather information and intelligence from target computers. The social engineering lure used in this campaign was timely, the researchers said, given the NATO meeting and “a news story about a Russian government ‘kill list’ targeting Ukrainians that began circulating in Western media outlets” Feb. 21. Proofpoint did not definitively attribute […]

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Ukrainian cyber officials warn of new wave of phishing attacks

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Ukrainian officials warned Friday that Belarusian hackers are sending a wave of phishing emails targeting Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. “Mass phishing emails have recently been observed targeting private ‘i.ua’ and ‘meta.ua’ accounts of Ukrainian military personnel and related individuals,” Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team wrote in a Facebook post Friday. Both URLs belong to Ukraine-based email services. Once an account is compromised, hackers gain access to the target’s messages and their contact details, allowing them to send additional phishing emails to their contacts, the CERT said. Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection issued a separate warning Friday about a phishing attack against civilian emails containing potentially malicious attached files. Warning ⚠️ A phishing #attack has started against Ukrainians! Citizens’ e-mail addresses receive letters with attached files of uncertain nature. The mass distribution of such messages to messengers may happen. #cyberattacks #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/YPvFH2oNk0 — SSSCIP Ukraine (@dsszzi) February 25, 2022 The […]

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