The Washington Post @washingtonpost
Hackers working for the Russian military conducted widespread phishing attempts against Ukrainian citizens in the runup to the invasion, and Belarus targeted both Ukrainians and the Polish military, Google said.
Belarus conducted widespread phishing campaigns against Ukraine, Poland, Google says
The campaign indicates that the Russia ally has done more in the war against Ukraine than serve as just a staging area for Russian troops
Googe’s threat-hunting team released details of the tricks deployed against the Polish military, which a spokeswoman said appeared to be the first report of its kind. Google said it had warned hundreds of Ukrainian residents about government-backed hacking attempts in the past year, most of them from Russia.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group said it did not know if any of the attempts had succeeded, since they were not aimed at Google’s email accounts.
In the past two weeks, the attack group known as Fancy Bear, which is associated with Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit, launched several large phishing campaigns against users of Ukr.net, a Ukrainian media organization, Google said. The emails came from compromised accounts and led targets to fake log-in pages.
Even more recently, in the days since Russia invaded Ukraine with logistical help from Belarus, a hacking group in Belarus known as Ghostwriter has used phishing to try to get credentials of Ukrainian government officials and members of the Polish military, Google said.
And
Google also said it had detected a China-based “threat actor,” Mustang Panda, attempting to plant malware in “targeted European entities with lures related to the Ukrainian invasion.” It did not name the organizations targeted but said the campaign “represented a shift from Mustang Panda’s regularly observed Southeast Asian targets.”
And
Not known as a significant force in hacking, Belarus was named by security firm Mandiant in November as behind hacking attempts in Poland and Lithuania.
The same group was identified by Google as also behind misinformation campaigns in neighboring countries, many of them critical of NATO, Mandiant said.
“These guys have been targeting Poland even before the war, it’s a natural enemy,” said Jaime Blasco, co-founder of start-up Nudge Security.