Russian hackers from the group known as “Fancy Bear” are targeting the U.S. Senate with a new espionage campaign, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. The Tokyo-based cybersecurity group tells The Hill that it has discovered a chain of suspicious-looking websites set up to look like the U.S. Senate’s internal email system, and learned that the sites were being operated as part of an email-harvesting operation. The websites were reportedly set up by Fancy Bear, a group linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. The group has been implicated in the hack of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Associated Press first reported Trend Micro’s findings.
The tactic used by Fancy Bear’s hackers to obtain Senate emails is “identical” to an operation carried out against French President Emmanuel Macron during the French elections last year, which led to the publication of Macron’s campaign emails two months later.
“That is exactly the way they attacked the Macron campaign in France,” Feike Hacquebord, an analyst at Trend Micro, said.
“We are 100 percent sure that it can be attributed to the Pawn Storm group,” said another analyst at the firm, using another code name for the Fancy Bear hacking group.
Full Article: Russia-linked hackers targeting US Senate | TheHill.