Russian Internet Search Company ‘Yandex’ was cyber attacked by a malware named ‘Regin’ and the nation’s intelligence is pointing fingers at ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence sharing alliance formed by Australia, New Zealand, Britain, United States, and Canada.
Reuters which 1st shared the news piece with the world on Friday last week says that the attack was being carried out since October last year and added that the infiltration into the server network of Yandex continued till Nov’18.
Yandex, the largest Russian tech firm which is reported to serve approximately 75% of the Russian Populace said that the attack could have been launched by one or multiple western nations last year. However, the company cleared the air that no data loss or siphoning of data occurred during the period of the incident as it was detected at a very early stage by the Yandex’s security team.
“As the cyber attack was fully neutralized before it could eject any damage, the attack remained concealed from the media due to reasons”, said Ilya Grabovsky, a spokesperson of Yandex Search Engine.
Security analysts from Kaspersky allege that the Regin malware attack was probably meant to gather data intelligence of Yandex users which could be further exploited in the future.
Malware Regin was previously traced on Belgium Telecom service provider “Belgacom” networks in 2012. It is basically an interception malware which was jointly developed by expertise working for US National Security Agency and GCHQ of UK.
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reacted to the news in a rather sarcastic way by saying that his nation gets attacked by its adversaries every day and the discovery of new attack was not surprising!
