Microsoft announced on Thursday, April 7, that it had intercepted yet another wave of Russian hacking attempts which targeted a wide range of media organizations and government institutions across Ukraine, the U.S., and the EU.
Microsoft said that it has informed Ukraine's government of the activity it had discovered and the steps it had taken against the cyberattack attempts.
Microsoft Has Disrupted Russian Cyberattacks on Ukraine
On Thursday, Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security & Trust at Microsoft, shared in a blog post that Microsoft has disrupted some cyberattacks from Strontium, a Russian GRU-connected actor targeting Ukraine. He explained that on Wednesday, the tech giant received a court order permitting it to take control of seven internet domains that Strontium, also known as Fancy Bear, used to carry out these attacks.
According to the blog, Microsoft has recently redirected these domains to a sinkhole under their control, allowing them to limit Strontium's ongoing use of these domains while still enabling victim notifications.
Gizmodo mentioned that Strontium is a Russian government affiliate that has been detected manipulating various companies in the past. According to Microsoft, the group was using seven different internet domains to launch assaults intended at spying on institutions in the U.S. and the EU.
Cyberattacks have long been a part of Russia's foreign policy maneuvering, allowing it to supplement its physical invasion of Ukraine by letting it infiltrate both Ukrainian and international websites owned by countries sending aid to the besieged country. Microsoft said it had informed Ukraine's government of the activity it had discovered and the steps it had taken.
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The Strontium attacks are only a minor part of the activities in Ukraine that Microsoft has observed. Prior to the Russian invasion, Microsoft teams began working around the clock to assist enterprises in Ukraine, including government agencies, in defending against an onslaught of cyberwarfare that has grown since the invasion began.
The Biden White House Counters Cyberattacks by Russia's Hackers
According to Wired, President Joe Biden's executive branch has taken more efforts to prevent and even temporarily disarm Russia's most dangerous hackers in the last two months than probably any prior administration has done in such a short period of time.
The countermeasures the U.S. has set included unsealing two indictments against members of notorious Russian state hacker groups, publicly blaming Russia's GRU military intelligence agency for distributed denial of service attacks against Ukrainian banks, and a rare FBI operation to remove malware from network devices that GRU hackers had used to control a global botnet of hacked machines.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo mentioned that Ukraine's government institutions, media organizations, and countless civilians have been subjected to a barrage of hacking efforts, both before and after Russia's siege of the country in February. This inspired the Ukrainian government to form a volunteer army of programmer recruits to essentially hack back at those Russian targets. Hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur hackers from both inside and outside Ukraine quickly came on board.
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