Russian hackers behind US election attacks also targeted hundreds of journalists

The Russian hacker group that targeted the United States presidential election in 2016 also attacked hundreds of reporters around the world, most of them Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows. The group is often referred to in cyber security circles as Fancy Bear, but is also known as Pawn Storm, Sednit, APT28, Sofacy, and STRONTIUM. It has been linked to a long-lasting series or coordinated attacks against at least 150 senior figures in the US Democratic Party. The attacks occurred in the run-up to last year’s presidential elections in the US, which resulted in a victory for Donald Trump. The hacker group’s targets included Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta. But its hackers also went after senior US diplomatic and intelligence officials, as well as foreign officials in countries like Canada and the Ukraine.

Now a new investigation by the Associated Press news agency, based on data collected over a period of two years by the cyber security firm Secureworks, appears to show that Fancy Bear also attacked journalists. In a leading article published last week, the Associated Press said that journalists appeared to be the third largest professional group targeted by Fancy Bear, after politicians and diplomats. The investigation shows that nearly half of all journalists that were systematically targeted by the hacker group worked for a single newspaper, The New York Times. At least fifty Times reporters feature on the hacker group’s target list. The latter includes another 50 reporters working for Russian outlets that known to be critical of the Kremlin, and dozens of Eastern European reporters based in the Baltics, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine.

The Associated Press said that prominent names on the Fancy Bear target list include The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, The Daily Beast’s intelligence correspondent Shane Harris, CNN’s security correspondent Michael Weiss, and Ellen Barry, the former Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. The report also said that some American journalists were not only targeted online, but also physically. One of them, The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, claims that she was routinely followed by Russian-speaking men in the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election. In April of this year, a study by the Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm Trend Micro showed that Fancy Bear was behind systematic efforts to subvert recent national elections in France and Germany. And a few weeks ago, Russian media reported that Konstantin Kozlovsky, a member of the prolific Russian hacker group Lurk, alleged that he had been hired by the Kremlin to help target the US Democratic Party.

► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 26 December 2017 | Permalink