Security News > 2021 > October > Microsoft: Russian state hackers behind 53% of attacks on US govt agencies

Microsoft says that Russian-sponsored hacking groups are increasingly targeting US government agencies, with roughly 58% of all nation-state attacks observed by Microsoft between July 2020 and June 2021 coming from Russia.

"Russian nation-state actors are increasingly targeting government agencies for intelligence gathering, which jumped from 3% of their targets a year ago to 53% - largely agencies involved in foreign policy, national security or defense," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Customer Security & Trust.

The most active Russian-backed threat actor is an activity group tracked by Microsoft as Nobelium.

In all, Nobelium has coordinated the attacks behind 92% of notifications Microsoft sent to its customers about Russia-based threat activity from July 2020 to June 2021.

As Microsoft further explained, this is only a partial overview of nation-state actors' breach attempts - Microsoft customers received 20,500 notifications about such attacks.

In April 2021, the US government formally accused this SVR division of coordinating the SolarWinds "Broad-scope cyber espionage campaign" that led to the compromise of multiple US federal agencies.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-russian-state-hackers-behind-53-percent-of-attacks-on-us-govt-agencies/