Hacker Attacks Over 150 Organizations by SolarWinds, Russia

As stated by Microsoft, cyber spies backed by the Russian forces, which were a reason for the SolarWinds Hacker campaign, launched a spear-phishing attack targeted towards the U.S and foreign government agencies and think tanks earlier this week with the help of an email marketing account of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

As per the trusted reports, the scammers targeted about 3,000 email accounts of over 150 different companies, among which at least one-fourth of them were a part of the international development, humanitarian, and human rights work, as stated by Tom Burt, Microsoft Vice President, in a blog on Thursday.

The blog doesn’t talk about the number of attempts that might have required a successful intrusion.A cybersecurity company named Volexity, which tracked the campaign but has low visibility into the email systems as compared to Microsoft, stated that as there is a relatively lower detection rate of the phishing emails, which makes it clear that the attacker was successful.

But, his blog said that the phishing campaign looked like a consistent and continuous effort put by the Russian Hacker with a major aim to target the government agencies that are involved in the foreign policies, which are a part of intelligence gathering efforts.

He further stated that the targets had spanned at least 24 countries.In a separate blog post, Microsoft stated that the attacker’s campaign is still on, and they have evolved across several waves of spear-phishing campaigns, which were first detected in January, leading to the mass mailings of this week.