It is a known fact that all NATO countries are against the Russian war on Ukraine and have denounced it, and that has probably not gone down well with Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the leader of the Russian Federation could have launched a cyber espionage campaign that was neutralized by Microsoft on a recent note.
On August 15th this year, the American tech giant released a press update stating that it has disabled accounts related to the Seaborgium group as it was involved in email collection, phishing and reconnaissance. Also, the Redmond giant included these domains into its cloud based Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, a platform that acts as a detection and analysis intelligence for the Bing search engine.
Seaborgium is a group of threat actors who are also known with names such as ColdRiver, TA446 and Callisto Group and is currently aiming businesses and individuals in UK and US. Mainly those that are into defense and intelligence sector and NGOs along with those who have links with the think tanks and educational organizations.
Microsoft says that this Russian backed group targets email and social media accounts and then builds a rapport and starts launching phishing campaigns by first hacking and bringing down the account and then impersonating the account with its own malicious motives.
Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has analyzed Seaborgium and established its link with Gameredon Group, also called as Actinium, as per the analysis conducted by the Office 365 Threat Intelligence Team of Microsoft.
NOTE- For the past few days, close aides of Putin are trying to establish a dialogue with the West as they intend to rest the war with the Volodymyr Zelensky led nation and solve the issue on an amicable note.
