Russia is back in news and that too for hacking the Republican National Committee (RNC) last week. However, the good news is that there was not data steal in the incident and that was confirmed by the spokesperson of RNC.
APT29 aka Cozy Bear, a hacking group funded by Kremlin is suspected to be behind the attack. And the same group was also suspected to be behind the attack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 that led to the leak of critical emails belonging to the ‘then’ president probable ‘Hillary Clinton’ leading to misinformation spread related to her in various social media platforms; eventually leading her to an enormous loss against the 45th President Donald Trump.
RNC released a press statement that the infiltration took place at a third party IT service provider named Synnex on July 4th ,2021 and the incident might be linked to the Kaseya Cyber Attack of last week.
Note-As per a July 2019 report jointly released by F-Secure and CrowdStrike the Federal Security Service of Russia is said to be funding the malware spreading activities of Cozy Bear also known with names such as Office Monkeys, CozyCar, CozyDuke, Nobelium, StellarParticle, and UNC2452. In 2021, FBI and NSA confirmed APT29 group to be behind the SolarWinds hack of 2020 and the data steal that took place in June 2020 on Corona Vaccine makers of UK, Canada and US.
Meanwhile, the Biden led government has met various federal agency leaders on Wednesday to elevate ransomware attacks as the National Security and Economic Priority. Thus the meeting that is said to be held behind closed doors will strengthen the cyber resilience of other sectors such as water, gas pipelines, and Chemicals on par with Electric utilities.
At a recently held a summit in Geneva, Biden has reportedly given Russian President Putin a list of sixteen of its critical sectors that shouldn’t be hacked. And the president was warned that if any of the hacking groups from his country, American would retaliate against such attacks with its own digital forces.
