Hacking groups within Russia's GRU military intelligence agency like Fancy Bear and Sandworm didn't cause the sort of mayhem this year that they did in the last decade—or the electoral sabotage that the security community feared as November approached.

But because the SolarWinds hack was what's known as a "supply chain" attack, in which Russia compromised a trusted tool rather than using known malware to break in, Einstein failed spectacularly.

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 .

Wednesday night, at a brief, hastily arranged press conference at FBI headquarters, four top US national security officials announced solemnly that they had evidence that two foreign adversaries, Iran and Russia, had obtained US voter data and appeared to be trying to spread disinformation about the election.

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.

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

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.

With the 2020 election now just seven months away, though, newly surfaced social media posts indicate that Russia’s Internet Research Agency is adapting its methods to circumvent those defenses.In September, University of Wisconsin researcher Young Mie Kim started analyzing posts on Facebook and Instagram from 32 accounts connected to the IRA.

The worse news is that said data has since been discovered in an online hacking forum, as first reported by ZDNet. The haul includes names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth, and celebrities, politicians, and journalists are among those affected.

“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.

Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.

A light edit for coherence: Trump believes—and by all indications this is true belief, not posturing —that after the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016, the DNC gave a physical server to Ukrainian cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and refused to let the FBI see the evidence.

Finally Twitter has relented, allowing you to get started with two-factor authentication straight from an authenticator app or Yubikey , no phone number required.To do so, go to Twitter on the web, and click Settings & Privacy > Account > Security > Two-Factor Authentication .

Microsoft notes that the hackers, long believed to be working in the service of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, began their attacks on September 16, just ahead of reports that the Worldwide Anti-Doping Agency had found "inconsistencies" in Russian athletes' compliance with anti-doping standards, which may lead to the country's ban from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, just as they were from the Pyeongchang Winter Games in 2018.

In addition to affirming much of what had been reported about Russian online interference over the past three years, the report—a second volume from the Senate committee—offers new insights into the extent of past foreign influence operations and recommendations on how best to prepare for those yet to come.

That’s when House representative Eliot Engel, the Democrat of New York and the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to White House national security advisor Robert O’Brien saying he was “deeply concerned” by reports that President Donald Trump was considering withdrawing from Open Skies.

Several of the people buried in the pit had much more tooth decay than the rest of the Yaroslavl dead, which actually suggests that they were pretty well-off.

Rocket Lab. A helicopter may soon catch a rocket, a radioactive cloud from 2017 has been pinned to Russia, and porn made a surprise appearance on a livestream.Rocket Lab. A strange radioactive cloud likely came from Russia.

After the ruthenium plume was detected in late 2017, IRSN issued a report in which it theorized that the accident occurred when Mayak attempted to create a highly compact, highly radioactive material that could emit a large number of neutrinos (difficult-to-detect fundamental particles) for a physics experiment in Italy called SOX.

When prosecutors moved in February of this year to nullify Manafort’s cooperation agreement with them—because he violated the deal by lying about his contacts with Kostya—a lead prosecutor told Judge Jackson that Manafort’s lies went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” In particular, the government asserted, Manafort had shared Trump polling data with Kostya, leaving many to wonder and speculate about why he might have done such a thing.

Jakarta's Doomed Sea Wall, Russia Takes Aim at 2020, and More News. Jakarta is sinking and its potential solution will too, Russia is gearing up for 2020, and we outline the best gear that came out in July. Jakarta's giant sea wall is useless if the city keeps sinking.

Security News This Week: WannaCry Hero Marcus Hutchins Won't Go to Jail for Old Hacking Crimes. The Senate Intel committee this week released its (heavily redacted) report on Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election.

"The idea that we can use cyber offense capabilities to impose sabotage-like effects, and to do so in increasingly large scale and costly ways until they get it through their head that they can’t win, I don’t think that's going to work," says Tom Bossert, who served as White House homeland security advisor and the president's most senior cybersecurity-focused official until April of last year .

In the Russian hinterland, life hasn't much changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and definitely doesn't have the fast pace of the nation's bigger cities, but when people ask Markov why he focuses on the harder aspects of Russian life, he has a simple answer: "Because I'm part of it.".

The public response was made all the more muddy by Attorney General William Barr's initial four-page summary of the report, which appeared to downplay the special counsel's findings around obstruction of justice.

Security News This Week: Putin Will Put Russia Behind an Internet Curtain. Motherboard reports that hackers breached Citycomp, a German internet infrastructure provider for some of the world’s biggest corporations, stealing financial data and then attempting to extort the companies to get it back.

A close read of Robert Mueller's 448-page report on Russian interference and potential Trump obstruction yields some fascinating tidbits. Robert Mueller’s final 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election—and Donald Trump’s apparent attempts to obstruct justice along the way—takes some time to read fully.

Mueller Report says Russia Hacked a Florida County's Network. “The FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government,” the report says.