NotPetya: How a Russian malware created the world's worst cyberattack ever

Imagine you wake up one day for work and realise that the IT hub in the office is acting fishy. All your colleagues, donning sharp suits, carrying compact laptops and tablets in one hand, a flask of coffee on the other, head to their desks for the day's operations to begin, only to find out that their files, both official and personal, are being "encrypted". A daunting idea, isn't it? And what if these files in your C drive are mysteriously being repaired or, maybe in a more surreal way, you are being ordered to pay a sum of $300 worth of bitcoin to decrypt the files -- all this is not just a wicked idea, but this is what happened at the time when the most devastating cyberattack took place in today's history.

Andy Greenberg, a senior writer with WIRED and author of his forthcoming Doubleday publication, Sandworm, chronicled the birth of the biggest cyberattack, that began, at least, as an assault on one nation by another. In an excerpt from his book, Greenberg says,"For the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding, undeclared war with Russia that has killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians and displaced millions more. 

Russian hackers targeting US Senate email accounts since June 2017: Report

A hacking group allegedly associated with the Russian government is actively targeting the US Senate's internal email system since June 2017, a cybersecurity firm claimed on Saturday.

According to Japanese cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, this is the same group that hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016.

The hackers' activities began in June 2017 when they attempted to compromise a lawmaker's credentials through a phishing site designed to look like the Senate's internal email system.

"Beginning in June 2017, phishing sites were set up mimicking the ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) of the US Senate. By looking at the digital fingerprints of these phishing sites and comparing them with a large data set that spans almost five years, we can uniquely relate them to a couple of 'Pawn Storm' incidents in 2016 and 2017," the security company said in a blog post.

"The real ADFS server of the U. S.

Senate is not reachable on the open internet, however phishing of users' credentials on an ADFS server that is behind a firewall still makes sense. In case an actor already has a foothold in an organization after compromising one user account, credential phishing could help him get closer to high profile users of interest," it added.

Trend Micro's report focuses on the efforts of a hacking group called "Pawn Storm" -- "an extremely active espionage actor group" more commonly known as "Fancy Bear".

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has deemed the group a "Russian-based threat actor" with likely ties to Russian military intelligence, Tech Crunch reported.
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