Microsoft points to new cyber espionage offensive against Western organizations

Russian hackers are back in the game. The Nobelium group, at the origin of a vast computer attack in the United States last year, is leading a new offensive against American and European organizations, warned the computer giant Microsoft.

“Nobelium is trying to replicate the strategy used in past attacks by targeting organizations that are an integral part of the global IT industry supply chain.”, wrote on Sunday October 24 in a blog post, Tom Burt, Microsoft vice president for customer security. Mr. Burt said these new attacks were detected from May.

Since then, Microsoft has notified more than 140 “resellers” (companies offering customization services for remote computing, or “cloud”) and technology server vendors that have been targeted. Nobelium became known to the general public in 2020 for the massive hacking of the computer management software publisher SolarWinds. The group had carried out a large operation affecting at least eight American administrations.

Resurgence of attacks

Microsoft and the American authorities accuse the Russian government of supporting these pirates, which Moscow denies formally. US President Joe Biden had imposed financial sanctions on Russia and expelled Russian diplomats following the SolarWinds hack.

“This recent activity is a new indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term and systematic access to various entry points in the technology supply chain and to establish a monitoring mechanism – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government ”, says Burt.

The manager specifies that this operation is part of an upsurge in computer attacks carried out by Nobelium. From 1^er July to October 19, Microsoft informed 609 of its customers of nearly 23,000 attacks, a tiny number of which were successful. Between June 2018 and June 2021, the Redmond (Washington) group ” only “ identified a total of 20,500 hacking attempts by all state actors.

Microsoft released a series of technical recommendations on Monday to help its customers better protect themselves against Nobelium attacks.