Senators, Staffers Next on Russia’s Cyber Hit List

According to the cyber security firm Trend Micro, the members of the U.S. Senate and their staff could be the next target of the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear – the same group linked to the DNC hack an election meddling across the Middle East  and Europe.

Trend says that digital breadcrumbs found so far in spear phishing campaigns link back to the Russian hacking group,

And, in a way, it makes perfect sense.  If the Russian’s objective is to meddle in elections across the globe, then the U.S. mid-term elections later this year would be a perfect target.  Spear phishing emails are pretty low tech but they lead to compromised userids and passwords (and was pretty lethal during last year’s elections).  Also consider that politicians and bureaucrats are addicted to email.  That makes them  a perfect target.

Some of the emails pretend to be Microsoft Exchange messages warning of expired passwords.  Low tech but pretty effective, unfortunately.

The researchers said that these spear phishing attacks looked a lot like the attacks rolling up to last year’s French elections.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  If it worked against the DNC,  if it worked against the French.  It is well known art.  It may well work against the Senate.

Senator Sasse (R-Neb) said that he thinks Putin is very happy that Washington is obsessed with partisan politics and is ignoring 2018 and 2020.  He is likely right.  To really fix things will require a lot of work and at least some money – something Washington doesn’t seem to be concerned about.  And it is a very distributed problem.  There are 50 states, 3600+ counties, the feds, government organizations, social media – a lot of targets of opportunities.

Which is not terribly surprising given that, before last year’s election there were only 5 people between both houses that had a computer science degree (I don’t know how the election changed things, but it likely didn’t change much).

Given all of the events coming up in the next year, including the Olympics and elections world wide and the apparent lack of interest in doing anything about it, we should assume that Russia will continue to be successful in their efforts influence politics – conspiracies or not.

Information for this post came from FCW.

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