Russians launching cyber attacks on US energy companies

Fuel Fix:
Russian government-linked hackers have targeted the U.S. energy industry and other sectors critical to running the economy in a new surge of online attacks since at least March 2016, federal agencies said on Thursday.

The hacking campaign, orchestrated by a seven-year-old group known as Dragonfly, has hit U.S. government entities and domestic companies in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors, according to an alert the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team put out on Thursday.

"In multiple instances, the threat actors accessed workstations and servers on a corporate network that contained data output from control systems within energy generation facilities," the U.S. CERT said.

Related: As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, energy industry's controls provide an alluring target

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have been studying the attacks, and found that the Russia-linked hackers are attacking some targets directly and penetrating the networks of others, such as third-party suppliers, to launch attacks on their intended victims.

The threat actors have dispatched spear-phishing emails, watering-hole domains and other attacks geared toward industrial control systems in the campaign. It was, the agencies said, a "multi-stage intrusion campaign" by Russian government hackers targeting "small commercial facilities' networks," where they "staged malware, conducted spear phishing and gained remote access into energy sector networks."
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It looks like the Russians are heating up their cyber war against the US and its industry.  The big question is when will the US counter-attack.  If the US fails to make crippling attacks in response these attacks will likely continue and get worse.  Sanctions are not going to cure this problem in a reasonable time frame.

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