Security News > 2022 > April > Microsoft Obtains Court Order to Take Down Domains Used to Target Ukraine

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it obtained a court order to take control of seven domains used by APT28, a state-sponsored group operated by Russia's military intelligence service, with the goal of neutralizing its attacks on Ukraine.

"We have since re-directed these domains to a sinkhole controlled by Microsoft, enabling us to mitigate Strontium's current use of these domains and enable victim notifications," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president of customer security and trust, said.

The tech giant noted that the sinkhole infrastructure was used by the threat actor to target Ukrainian institutions as well as governments and think tanks in the U.S. and the European Union so as to maintain long term persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive information.

The disclosure from Microsoft comes as Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, disclosed that it took action against covert adversarial networks originating from Azerbaijan and Iran on its platform, by taking down the accounts and blocking their domains from being shared.

"This group used a combination of low-sophistication fake accounts and more elaborate fictitious personas, which they likely used to build trust with potential targets and trick them into clicking on phishing links or downloading malicious applications," Meta outlined in its first quarterly Adversarial Threat Report.

Meta also said it blocked the malicious activities associated with an unreported Iranian hacking group that leveraged tactics similar to that of Tortoiseshell to target or spoof companies in the energy, IT, maritime logistics, semiconductor, and telecom industries.

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https://thehackernews.com/2022/04/microsoft-obtains-court-order-to-take.html