Given the Russian government’s active efforts to isolate the country’s internet and gain access to all data, Parler could expose its users to Russian surveillance if the site someday does relaunch in full with DDoS-Guard.

On Monday morning Kaspersky published new evidence of technical similarities between malware used by the mysterious SolarWinds hackers, known by security industry names including UNC2452 and Dark Halo, and the well-known hacker group Turla, believed to be Russian in origin and also known by the names Venomous Bear and Snake.

Now, after a federal career that many credited with helping to secure the 2020 presidential election from foreign interference, Krebs is venturing into the other massive cybersecurity story of the last year: the Russian hacker intrusion into SolarWinds , a Texas-based company whose software was hijacked and used to penetrate the networks of at least half a dozen federal agencies.

This week, several major United States government agencies—including the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and State—discovered that their digital systems had been breached by Russian hackers in a months-long espionage operation .

In an advisory today, the National Security Agency said that Russian state-sponsored groups have been actively attacking a vulnerability in multiple enterprise remote-work platforms developed by VMware.

Russian and North Korean Hackers Hit Covid-19 Vaccine FirmsAuthorities have warned for months that public health organizations and vaccine developers would be high-value targets for state-sponsored hacking groups .

The success of email spam filters has left scammers looking for new ways to get people to click on malicious links.One of the scam notifications received by WIRED linked to a Google Slides document that had been created by a Gmail account with a Russian name.

We took a closer look at Berserk Bear, the Russian hacking group that for years has broken into critical US infrastructure targets—and more recently, election-adjacent systems—without ever actually causing serious mayhem.

It meant that early-stage embryos might have unique repair mechanisms other cells don’t that could be harnessed for gene editing.Last year, a Russian scientist made public his plans to use Crispr to help deaf parents have children who won’t inherit a gene mutation that causes hearing impairment.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an advisory warning that a group known as Berserk Bear—or alternately Energetic Bear, TEMP.Isotope, and Dragonfly—had carried out a broad hacking campaign against US state, local, territorial, and tribal government agencies, as well aviation sector targets.

And when one cybersecurity researcher named Mike Assante dug into the details of that attack, he recognized a grid-hacking idea invented not by Russian hackers, but by the United State government, and tested a decade earlier.

Today the US Treasury imposed sanctions on Russia's Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics, the organization that exactly two years ago was revealed to have played a role in the hacking operation that used that malware known as Triton or Trisis, intended to sabotage the Petro Rabigh refinery's safety devices.

Facebook attributed one of the disinformation distribution networks to "actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in 'DC leaks' in 2016.The network tied to IRA-linked individuals included accounts and groups collectively posing as a Turkey-based think tank.

Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of Rappler, an investigative news website in the Philippines, says we talk about disinformation all wrong.Ressa repeatedly warned Facebook of the threat to press freedoms and democratic institutions just as Russian campaigns were working to destabilize the 2016 US presidential campaign.

The attack has some important limitations, but it's a good reminder that modern telephony still has more than its share of security holes—and 5G isn't looking that much better .Crooks Use 'Russian SIMs' to Outfox Law EnforcementMotherboard this week took a deep dive down the rabbit hole of Russian SIMs, also known as white SIMs, that let criminals spoof phone numbers at will, or in some cases allow for real-time voice manipulation.

The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on everything from social media to pro-Russian news websites.

This week, WIRED broke the news of a Russian military intelligence hacking campaign that dates all the way back to December 2018.

And we took a fresh look at an old debate: whether TikTok actually poses a security threat to the US.Russian hackers are targeting Covid-19 vaccine research .

The Russian-founded, UK-based Telegram connected different far-right communities, helping to bring far more organization to the movement as a whole.Breaking precedent, the administrator of Terrorwave Refined began begging others for help, going as far as offering Bitcoin payments to anyone who could find a way to bring the channel and its followers back intact:.

It has run relatively few campaigns related to Syria and its civil war but is devoted to a common priority for Russia-backed digital actors: undermining and destabilizing Ukraine .Though Secondary Infektion's activities are difficult to track, Graphika researchers were able to piece the its activity together by looking at rare occasions where the group reused an account a few times, and identifying patterns in sets of blogs and forums the group would post to.

Once SpaceX starts ferrying astronauts to orbit on operational missions, seats on Crew Dragon will cost roughly half the price of a seat on the Russian Soyuz capsule.

On Thursday, the NSA issued an advisory that the Russian hacker group known as Sandworm , a unit of the GRU military intelligence agency, has been actively exploiting a known vulnerability in Exim, a commonly used mail transfer agent—an alternative to bigger players like Exchange and Sendmail—running on email servers around the world.

Is BGP Safe Yet will test your ISP by offering a legitimate route and an invalid one to load two pages.Prince explains that during a disruption like the Russian telecom incident, ISPs using BGP best practices would identify the issue, often called a "route leak," and reject it in favor of a legitimate route.

This week, the Chinese firm QiAnXin spotted Russian hackers—possibly affiliated with the groups Sandworm and Fancy Bear —sending phishing emails laced with malicious document attachments to Ukrainian targets.Meanwhile, the Vietnamese security firm VinCSS detected a high volume of novel coronavirus-related phishing emails over the last two weeks attributed to government hackers.

“We saw Russia amplifying conspiracy theories suggesting that delays in reporting returns were part of an effort to deny Senator Sanders a clear win,” says Jessica Brandt, head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan nonprofit that tracks and counteracts Russian disinformation.

All of that makes Burisma an almost inevitable target for another hack-and-leak operation of the sort that Russia carried out against the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in 2016—once again with the goal of influencing a US election .Now the first evidence has surfaced, in a report from security firm Area 1, that the very same team of Russian hackers who hit those targets may in fact have hacked Burisma.

Over the holidays, the Russian government said it had completed a multi-day test of a national, internal internet known as RuNet, a bid to show that the country's online infrastructure could survive even if disconnected from the rest of the world.

Like many teenagers growing up in the early- to mid-aughts, Russian photographer Rus Khasanov spent an obscene amount of money on CDs. He displayed his favorites on a shelf—Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, assorted Harry Potter soundtracks—and protected the rest inside black faux-leather binders, handling the discs with utmost care.

In the team’s most recent creation, For All Mankind, Moore and company introduce audiences to a new history of the space program: One where the Russians made it to the moon first; where Ted Kennedy cancelled his party on Chappaquiddick; and where national heroes like Buzz Aldrin and Wernher von Braun become people, wracked with their own insecurities, flaws, and humanity.

Moreover, very little of the IRA’s spending was on traditional political advertising: The Senate report notes that only about 5 percent of the Russian ads users saw prior to the presidential election actually referenced Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump directly.