With continued cyberattacks against Ukraine, state-backed Russian hackers are engaged in “strategic espionage” against governments, think tanks, businesses and aid groups in 42 countries that support Kyiv, Microsoft said in a report on Wednesday. .
“Since the start of the war, Russian targeting (of Ukraine’s allies) has been 29 percent successful,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wroteWith data theft in at least one-quarter of successful network intrusions.
“As a coalition of countries has come together to defend Ukraine, Russian intelligence agencies have accelerated network penetration and espionage activities by targeting Allied governments outside Ukraine,” Smith said.
About two-thirds of the targets of cyber espionage involved NATO members. The United States was the prime target and Poland, the main conduit for military aid flowing into Ukraine, was second. In the past two months, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Turkey have seen an uptick in targeting.
One striking exception is Estonia, where Microsoft said it had not found any Russians. cyber Incursions since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February. Company credited with adopting Estonia cloud computing, where it is easier to detect intruders. “Significant collective defensive vulnerabilities remain,” Microsoft said without identifying them, among some other European governments.
According to the 28-page report, half of the 128 organizations targeted are government agencies and 12 percent are non-governmental agencies, usually think tanks or humanitarian groups. Other targets include telecommunications, energy and defense companies.
Microsoft said Ukraine’s cyber security has “proven to be stronger” than Russia’s capabilities in “waves of devastating cyber attacks against 48 different Ukrainian agencies and enterprises”. The report said Moscow’s military hackers have been cautious not to expel destructive data-destroying insects that could spread outside Ukraine, as did the Notpatia virus in 2017.
“During the past month, as Russian forces moved to concentrate their attacks in the Donbass region, the number of destructive attacks has declined,” according to the report titled Defense of Ukraine: early lessons from cyber warfare, The Redmond, Washington, company has unparalleled insight into the domain due to the ubiquity of its software and threat detection teams.
Microsoft said Ukraine has also set an example in data security. Ukraine went from storing its data locally on servers in government buildings a week before the Russian invasion – making them vulnerable to airstrikes – to spreading that data to the cloud, hosted in data centers across Europe. Gone.
The report also assessed Russian propaganda and propaganda aimed at “undermining Western unity and deflecting criticism of Russian military war crimes” and wooing people in non-aligned countries.
using the artificial intelligence The tool, Microsoft said, estimated that “Russian cyber influence operations successfully increased the spread of Russian propaganda after the war began by 216 percent in Ukraine and 82 percent in the United States.”