The effort targeted about 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organizations, at least a quarter of them involved in international development, humanitarian and human rights work
The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted spear-phishing assault on U.S. and foreign government agencies and think tanks this week using an email marketing account of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Microsoft says. The effort targeted about 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organizations, at least a quarter of them involved in international development, humanitarian and human rights work, Microsoft Vice President Tom Burt said in a blog post late Thursday. It did not say what portion of the attempts may have led to successful intrusions but said in a separate technical blog post that most were blocked by automated systems that marked them as spam. “We’re also in the process of notifying all of our customers who have been targeted,” Burt said. The cybersecurity firm Volexity, which also tracked the campaign but has less visibility into email systems than Microsoft, said in a post that relatively low detection rates of the phishing emails suggest the attacker was “likely having some success in breaching targets.
