Category Archives: Russia

How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2)

How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2)

Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the Dark Web, one Russian black market always seems to survive. For more than two and half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace or RAMP has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering one of the Internet’s widest arrays of narcotics of every variety to its Russian-speaking clientele.

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White House Unclassified Network Hacked, Apparently by Russians

The unclassified network of the Executive Office of the President—the administrative network of the White House—was breached by attackers thought to be working for the Russian government, according to multiple reports. The Washington Post reported that an investigation is ongoing, and White House officials are not saying what data, if any, was stolen from the computers on the network. “We are still assessing the activity of concern,” an unnamed White House official told the Post.

According to the Post’s anonymous sources, the breach was discovered in early October after a friendly foreign government alerted US officials. The network’s virtual private network access was shut down, and some staff members were told to change passwords. “We took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” the Post’s source at the White House said. “Unfortunately, some of that resulted in the disruption of regular services to users. But people were on it and are dealing with it.”

This isn’t the first time attackers, apparently sponsored by a foreign state, have targeted the White House’s network. In 2008 and 2012, Chinese hackers penetrated the White House’s network. On the first occasion, the attackers gained access to the White House’s e-mail server; in 2012, a phishing attack against White House staffers gave attackers access to the network, though officials said no sensitive data was exposed.

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Suspected Russian “Sandworm” Cyber Spies Targeted NATO, Ukraine

A group of cyber spies targeted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries over the last year, in some cases using a previously unknown flaw in Windows systems to infiltrate targets, according to a research report released on Tuesday.

Dubbed “Sandworm” by iSIGHT Partners, the security consultancy that discovered the zero-day attack, the campaign is suspected to be Russian in origin based on technical details, the malware tools used, and the chosen targets, which also included government agencies in Europe and academics in the United States. If confirmed, the attack is an uncommon look into Russia’s cyber-espionage capabilities.

“We can confirm that NATO was hit; we know from several sources that multiple organizations in the Ukraine were targeted,” said John Hultquist, senior manager of cyber-espionage threat intelligence for iSIGHT. “We have seen them using Ukrainian infrastructure as part of their attacks.”

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Russian ‘Sandworm’ Hack Has Been Spying on Foreign Governments for Years

Russian ‘Sandworm’ Hack Has Been Spying on Foreign Governments for Years

A cyberespionage campaign believed to be based in Russia has been targeting government leaders and institutions for nearly five years, according to researchers with iSight Partners who have examined code used in the attacks. The campaign, dubbed “Sandworm” is believed to have been running since 2009, and used a wide-reaching zero-day exploit uncovered by the […]

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