Yet after so many attack on U.S. companies and firms from China and other countries, reports have emerged that the Russian hackers are also now putting American power and gas firms on the target. Reports stated that the Russian hackers are now working on breaching the security of the gas and the power industry to take over the control.
The situation now is similar to what happened in 2009 due to Stuxnet virus. The Russian hackers will avail the opportunity to take over any industrial system in the network, they will infect it with sophisticated worms and malwares to take over it which inturn is very much scary.
Symantec, a computer security firm, released a report which reflected that US has a share 24% in “Top 10 countries by active infections (where attackers stole information from infected computers)”
Hackers not only target the connected severs, but also the people working in the firm and or linked to it somehow. Calling it an “watering hole attack”, hackers are sending out mass number of emails having malicious links and or the malicious attachments. The reports also stated that the attacks are government sponsored and the hackers are being backed by the Russian government.
Symantec said, “An ongoing cyberespionage campaign against a range of targets, mainly in the energy sector, gave attackers the ability to mount sabotage operations against their victims. The attackers, known to Symantec as Dragonfly, managed to compromise a number of strategically important organizations for spying purposes and, if they had used the sabotage capabilities open to them, could have caused damage or disruption to energy supplies in affected countries.”
“The Dragonfly group, which is also known by other vendors as Energetic Bear, appears to have been in operation since at least 2011 and may have been active even longer than that. Dragonfly initially targeted defense and aviation companies in the US and Canada before shifting its focus mainly to US and European energy firms in early 2013,” they included.
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