Microsoft has made a recent study and discovered that Russia indulged in over 58% of state funded attacks last year with China’s responsibility detected less that 10%. The tech giant also concluded that the threat actors from the Putin nation mostly targeted IT infrastructure based in United States followed by Ukraine, Britain and European NATO members.
What’s surprising about the survey is the fact that Beijing made up to less than just 10% of state funded attacks. But proved successful over 44 percent of time with deep espionage.
Satya Nadella led company confirmed the devastating effects of the state sponsored cyber attacks on US critical infrastructure in its annual Digital Defense Report, after analyzing loads of data between June 30,2021 till the same time this year.
“Russia is constantly hitting government agencies to gather valuable data and a surge by 53% was observed last year, when the entire world was jostling with the affects of lock-down from the china propelled COVID Pandemic,” said Tom Burt, Vice President of Customer Security & Trust division, Microsoft.
Most of the attacks were of ransomware variant as the criminals had a gala time in launching file encrypting malware attacks on government agencies- throughout the SolarWinds hack.
The Redmond based Technology giant also stated in its Digital Defense Report that the law-makers were demanding retaliation by Trump administration as soon as the SolarWinds hack was brought to light at the same time last year.
However, Joe Biden, who took office as a President from January 2021, was more interested in dealing the matter in peace, rather than drawing the red line against the cyber activity that was permissible.
Note- The government agencies that were targeted through SolarWinds vulnerability attack were Pentagon, FBI, Treasury, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, Department of Energy, National Institute of Health, National Nuclear Administration, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Office of Secure Transportation.
