Updated at 10:22 a.m. ET

Russian hackers working for the Kremlin are believed to be behind an attack into U.S. government computer systems at the departments of Treasury and Commerce that may have lasted months before it was detected, according to U.S. officials and media reports.

The hackers reportedly broke into the email systems at those two government departments, but the full extent of the breach was not immediately clear as U.S. officials scrambled to make an assessment. There are concerns that hackers may have penetrated other government departments and perhaps many private companies as well.

The Commerce Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security all acknowledged the intrusion in brief statements but provided no details.

“We can confirm there has been a breach in one of our bureaus,” the Commerce Department said.

“We have been working closely with our agency partners regarding recently discovered activity on government networks,” said NSC spokesman John Ullyot.

The U.S. government did not name Russia or any other actor as being responsible.

Reuters first reported the story on Sunday, and subsequent reports identified Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, as the most likely culprit.

Russia’s SVR, the rough equivalent to the CIA in the U.S., was blamed for major hacks in 2014-15 that involved unclassified email systems at the White House, State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Russia on Monday denied any involvement in the latest reported breach.

Emergency directive

Meanwhile, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of Homeland Security, issued an emergency directive calling on all federal civilian agencies to review their computer networks for signs of the compromise. The statement also said agencies should disconnect from SolarWinds Orion products immediately.

SolarWinds has government contracts, including with the military and intelligence services, and also works with many large private companies. The attackers are believed to have used a “supply chain attack” method that embeds malicious code into legitimate software updates.

“The compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks,” CISA’s acting Director Brandon Wales said in a statement. “Tonight’s directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners — in the public and private sectors — to assess their exposure to this compromise.”

SolarWinds, based in Austin, Texas, put out its own statement saying it was aware that its systems were experiencing a “highly sophisticated, manual supply chain attack” on specific versions of its Orion platform software released between March and June of this year.

“We have been advised this attack was likely conducted by an outside nation-state and intended to be a narrow, extremely targeted, and manually executed attack, as opposed to a broad, system-wide attack,” the company said.

Kevin Thompson, SolarWinds’ president and CEO, said the company was working with the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and other law enforcement agencies to investigate.

Tech companies respond

Two other tech companies, Microsoft and FireEye, also weighed in.

Microsoft said in a blog post late Sunday, “We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale, aimed at both the government and private sector.”

The Commerce Department and the Treasury Department use the Microsoft Office 365 platform, Reuters and The New York Times reported Sunday.

FireEye reported last week that hackers, also believed to be Russians, stole the company’s key tools used to test vulnerabilities in the computer networks of its customers, which include government agencies.

FireEye said in a blog post late Sunday night that it had identified “a global campaign that introduces a compromise into the networks of public and private organizations through the software supply chain.”

Speaking in Moscow last Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed allegations that Russia was involved in the FireEye hack.

“I want to remind you that it was President (Vladimir) Putin who proposed that the American side agree and conclude agreements (with Russia) on cybersecurity,” Peskov said, adding that Washington had ignored the offer.

“If there have been attacks for many months, and the Americans could not do anything about it, it is probably not worth immediately, groundlessly blaming the Russians. We didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said.

NPR’s national security correspondent Greg Myre contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/14/946163194/russia-suspected-in-months-long-cyber-attack-on-federal-agencies

The post Russia Suspected In Major Cyberattack On U.S. Treasury, Commerce Departments first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

WASHINGTON – A concerted Russian hacking and online disinformation campaign in 2016 sought to tip the U.S. presidential election toward Donald Trump. Two weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections, Moscow’s operatives are at it again.

The shutdown of thousands of Russian-controlled accounts by Twitter and Facebook — plus the indictments of 14 people from Russia’s notorious troll farm the Internet Research Agency — have blunted but by no means halted their efforts to influence U.S. politics.

#MAGA — Trump’s rallying call to “Make America Great Again” — remains the top hashtag among 18,000 tweets pumped out daily by hundreds of Russia-backed and allied Twitter accounts monitored by Hamilton 68, a tracking operation of the Alliance for Securing Democracy in Washington.

The leading linked website this week? A Republican voter registration page.

“After the election in 2016, there was a lot of talk about whether the Russians will be back in 2018,” said Suzanne Spaulding, senior adviser on the Homeland Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We now know: they never left.”

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department announced criminal conspiracy charges against the Internet Research Agency clerk who manages the tens of millions of dollars the outfit spends on information operations in the United States and Europe.

The charges documented typical social media postings on IRA accounts that purported to be American and were mainly aimed at fanning the flames of political anger.

“Just a friendly reminder to get involved in the 2018 Midterms,” said a tweet posted earlier this year by @johncopper16, which prosecutors say was an identity created by the IRA.

“They hate you. They hate your morals…. They hate the Police. They hate the Military. They hate YOUR President.”

Such divisive messages could influence the November 6 vote. While the presidency is not up for grabs, control of Congress is, making voter turnout in specific individual races important.

That is not what has U.S. experts worried the most, however.

“The biggest concern is really about undermining public confidence in the credibility of the outcome of the election,” said Spaulding. “It is really a broader campaign to undermine democracy.”

In 2016, according to U.S. intelligence, Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a concerted effort to disrupt the election and turn voters away from Hillary Clinton in order to help Trump’s campaign.

This included hackers of the GRU military intelligence body breaking into the computers and communications of Clinton’s campaign to steal documents that were later leaked to embarrass her.

Separately, the IRA ran a huge, innovative disinformation campaign on social media that stoked anger, confusion and divisions, and was also aimed at boosting Trump.

On Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, they created online identities and groups, gathered followings, endorsing, cross-posting and sharing fake news stories and angry messages, to great effect.

That continued after the election, until a year ago when Twitter shut down hundreds of accounts that it identified as part of Russia’s political meddling.

New accounts sprung up, many of them automated bots. Rather than creating content, they amplified the huge amount of divisive material already out there, said Bret Schafer, who oversees the Hamilton 68 website.

“Now the people sitting at the IRA in St. Petersburg, they don’t even have to create this stuff. It’s created for them.”

One example, said Ben Nimmo, who runs the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was the intense, two-week online battle over Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in September.

The massive amount of false reports and virulent personal attacks across social media came largely from American accounts, he said.

The Russians needed only stir the pot by retweeting and reposting them, which can be done with bots.

“There is a huge amount of angry Americans on both sides. They are more than capable of generating massive traffic on their own,” he said.

After Twitter launched a second sweep of fake accounts several weeks ago, the volume of Russian activity has fallen sharply, noted Nimmo.

The platform closed thousands of accounts that were Russian-run and had been responsible for some 9 million tweets, including those mentioned in Friday’s criminal complaint.

Since then, Nimmo said, “they have definitely been trying harder to hide their tracks.”

It’s not clear, however, whether they are making a concerted “third wave” effort at the moment.

Two weeks before the election, the Hamilton 68 site shows Moscow has not given up, even if the intensity of its activity has waned.

This week, the top 10 themes and linked articles in the accounts it monitors were strongly pro-Trump, pro-Republican: They highlighted Trump’s most recent rally, the alleged threat of a migrant caravan in Mexico and a hashtag newly favored by Trump, #jobsnotmobs.

James Lewis, a Russia and cyber expert at CSIS, thinks the Russians are honing their skills for the next presidential race, rather than attempting to impact the current election cycle.

“They may be saving their best tricks for 2020,” he said.

Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/10/24/world/politics-diplomacy-world/russians-stir-anger-ahead-u-s-midterms/#.W9AH_ehKiUk

The post Russians out to stir anger ahead of U.S. midterms first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.