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Microsoft says Russian hackers targeted OneDrive, US Senate & think tanks

We’re not sure how US President Donald Trump is going to deny this latest Russian hackers story.

According to Microsoft, they are at it once again, this time targeting several different spheres of influence, launching cyber attacks on the company’s OneDrive Cloud platform, the US Senate and a pair of think tanks in the States.

Reuters says Microsoft took control of six domains that hackers had created mimicking websites for, belonging to the aforementioned targets.

The tactics reportedly involved using phishing schemes to trick users into providing login details for the targeted website. From there hackers are able to access sensitive systems such as the computer networks and confidential databases.

This new takedown is the latest in a string that Microsoft has made involving hacking group Fancy Bear (also known as APT28), which has ties to the Russian government.

“We’re concerned that these and other attempts pose security threats to a broadening array of groups connected with both American political parties in the run-up to the 2018 elections,” explained Microsoft president Brad Smith in a blog post about the company’s findings.

With Russia having previously been implicated multiple times in 2016’s US Presidential elections, this latest development only adds credence to such claims, despite Trump making comments to the contrary.

Microsoft says it has no evidence at this stage that the Russian hackers’ attempts were successful in compromising any user credentials or stealing any vital data.

The Russian government, however, is not buying Microsoft’s recent claims.

“It is regrettable that a large international company, which has been working in the Russian market for a long time, quite actively and successfully has to take part in a witch-hunt that has engulfed Washington,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry noted in statement to Reuters.

While Russia is not confirming any involvement in state-sponsored hacking, other tech companies aren’t taking any chances with the congressional elections happening in November.

To that end both Facebook and Twitter have removed several hundred accounts for being linked to Russian hacking, with the former citing “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”

Twitter followed Facebook’s move shortly thereafter, removing an estimated 284 accounts for “coordinated manipulation.”

Whether other tech companies and social media platforms will follow suit with purging of suspicious accounts, pages or users, remains to be seen.

What is clear though is that Russian hackers are ramping up their efforts as the congressional elections get closer.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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