Republican Party chief of staff Richard Walters told Bloomberg that the Republican National Committee (RNC) learned over the weekend that third-party provider Synnex had been breached. “We immediately blocked all access from Synnex accounts to our cloud environment,” he said. “Our team worked with Microsoft to conduct a review of our systems and after a thorough investigation, no RNC data was accessed.
We will continue to work with Microsoft, as well as federal law enforcement officials, on this matter.” In a separate statement, Synnex said it was conducting a thorough review of the attack since identified. “We are a long-term distribution partner for Microsoft and along with them, responded with the requisite urgency to address the recent attacks and to limit the potential activities of these bad actors,” said Dennis Polk, president, and CEO of Synnex. “We will remain vigilant and focused on the security of our organization.” The incident is another in a string of attacks by Russia-based threat actors on US companies and infrastructure.
Last month, President Biden brought up the problem with Russian president Vladimir Putin, warning the US would launch offensive cyber operations in the future unless the Kremlin cracked down on cyberattacks against the US. Biden said to Putin that the US has “significant cyber capability”. “He knows it. He doesn’t know exactly what it is, but he knows it’s significant. If in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond,” Biden told reporters after the meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Biden told reporters that he had given Putin a list of 16 areas of the US economy that are off-limits to attack and would provoke a response.
The Kremlin has denied all previous attacks, including the ones on the 2016 presidential election that US intelligence officials concluded involved Russian interference. Last week, the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre released a joint report that discovered “malicious cyber activities by Russian military intelligence against the US and global organizations, starting from mid-2019 and likely ongoing.”
Source: www.techcentral.ie/russian-cozy-bear-hackers-reportedly-attacked-the-republican-party/
Russia, North Korea, China, and other nations launch sophisticated attacks against the United States, including attempts to destroy infrastructure and undermine the credibility of elections in America and France, Stavridis said. And the United States is often sheepish to strike back in shows of force, he added.
“Unwillingness to operate offensively in cyberspace is driven less by a fear of retaliation and more by a fear of compromising our intelligence community’s sensitive tradecraft,”
he said.
Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, said there is still a lack of consensus in the United States and the international community about what kinds of attacks warrant a response, and outdated thinking still suggests cyber assaults require an in-kind digital response, when other measures, such as conventional military strikes or sanctions, might be more appropriate.
Source: FBI
In recent years, breaches have seen multiple billion-dollar companies hit by extortionists demanding bitcoin ransom. This is because hackers see how vulnerable these large organizations are to attacks and extortion – and are taking advantage of them to target smaller businesses like yours.
Carl Riedel is an experienced writer focused on using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to produce insightful articles. Passionate about free speech, he leverages OSINT to delve into public data, crafting stories that illuminate underreported issues, enriching public discourse with perspectives often overlooked by mainstream media.
