Microsoft and Russia: Who Does What to Whom?
October 26, 2021
Last year’s infamous Solar Winds attack really boosted Russia’s hacking community. That is one take-away from MarketBeat’s write-up, “Microsoft: Russia Behind 58% of Detected State-Backed Hacks.” Writer Frank Bajak shares some details from Microsoft’s second annual Digital Defense Report:
“Russia accounted for most state-sponsored hacking detected by Microsoft over the past year, with a 58% share, mostly targeting government agencies and think tanks in the United States, followed by Ukraine, Britain and European NATO members, the company said. The devastating effectiveness of the long-undetected SolarWinds hack — it mainly breached information technology businesses including Microsoft — also boosted Russian state-backed hackers’ success rate to 32% in the year ending June 30, compared with 21% in the preceding 12 months. China, meanwhile, accounted for fewer than 1 in 10 of the state-backed hacking attempts Microsoft detected but was successful 44% of the time in breaking into targeted networks, Microsoft said. … Only 4% of all state-backed hacking that Microsoft detected targeted critical infrastructure, the Redmond, Washington-based company said, with Russian agents far less interested in it than Chinese or Iranian cyber-operatives.”
Well, that is something. Ransomware, though, is also up, with the U.S. targeted three times as often as the next nation. Anyone who was affected by the Colonial Pipeline attack may be concerned about our infrastructure despite the lack of state-sponsored interest in sabotaging it. We are told state-backed attackers are mostly interested in intelligence gathering. Bajak cites Microsoft Digital Security Unit’s Cristin Goodwin as he writes:
“Goodwin finds China’s ‘geopolitical goals’ in its recent cyber espionage especially notable, including targeting foreign ministries in Central and South American countries where it is making Belt-and-Road-Initiative infrastructure investments and universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong where resistance to Beijing’s regional ambitions is strong.”
North Korea is another participant covered in the report. That country was in second place as a source of attacks at 23%, though their effectiveness was considerably less impressive—only 6% of their spear-phishing attempts were successful. Bajak closes by reminding us the report can only include attacks Microsoft actually detected. See the write-up or the report itself for more information.
Cynthia Murrell, October 26, 2021
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
