Microsoft: Russian, North Korean Cyberattacks Target COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts (axios.com) 28
Microsoft said Friday it has detected at least seven attacks on companies working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine or treatments. From a report: The company said attacks by three nation-state actors -- two from North Korea and one from Russia -- have targeted companies in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. "Two global issues will help shape people's memories of this time in history -- COVID-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society," Microsoft deputy general counsel Tom Burt said in a blog post. "It's disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic." Attackers have used a range of approaches including phishing schemes and brute force to get needed passwords, with one group tied to North Korea posing as the World Health Organization in its spear-phishing effort. Microsoft said its built-in security protections stopped a majority of the attacks. "We've notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we've offered help," Burt said.
Put it in some ones head only need 320GB (Score:1)
Put it in some ones head only need 320GB
Really? (Score:4, Informative)
I've also seen crap ton of stuff coming from Microsoft Azure.
What are you doing to deal with spammers using your DDOS infra, MS?
Re:Yeah,I'm gonna put a hold on that being true/fa (Score:4, Informative)
What you're supposed to do is vote for a government that will vigorously defend your country from foreign threats. Defending the country is something any minimally competent government tries to do. Hatred of Russia doesn't come into it. I *pity* Russia. The Russian people live in a country where the government assassinates journalists and political rivals. They don't have any choice but to live with feckless, incompetent officials.
Why does Russia, with its vast natural wealth and remarkable human talent pool, have an economy that's only slightly larger than Spain's, a country with 1/3 the population? Because the Russian government and its cronies are stealing the country's wealth and stashing it overseas, mainly in real estate.
Any country that is not a democracy develops power centers that are rigid, bureaucratic, and territorial. Those power centers don't do things for the good of the country; they do things because doing them expands their bureaucratic turf. So all the theories that try to show that Russia is doing this because it somehow benefits the country are proceeding from a faulty assumption: that the people behind it are trying to help their own country. You have to think in terms of agency interests rather than national interests; whose *careers* gets helped?
Any American who admires Vladmir Putin's leadership needs to have his head examined. An effective leader with the resources Putin has had at his disposal would have grown the country's GDP to at least that of Germany or the UK. Instead Russia has less than half the GDP of those countries because it's weighed down by government corruption and incompetence.
Re:Yeah,I'm gonna put a hold on that being true/fa (Score:4, Interesting)
While much of what you write is true, there are some pieces that show an amazing lack of context-knowledge.
First, why is the Russian economy down? Because it was purposefully crashed by the west in an effort to remove Russia as a superpower from the political scene. That was quite successful, the Russian people saw their life savings evaporate and the whole concept of the Oligarch began at that time, i.e. the extreme inequality in wealth that we see today.
Second, Putin was an extremely effective leader at that time and many Russians still admire him for that. He led the country out of the 90s where gang shootings on the street were common and people felt so insecure in their homes that to this day most russian flats have metal doors with multiple locks and safety bolts. Putin ended that. Whatever you think of Russia today, it is definitely a huge step forward from then.
Third, the same is true for the economy. Soviet Russia was locked in an arms race with the USA and the whole fall of the USSR was largely because the economy couldn't sustain that arms race anymore. My parents visited St. Petersburg in the late 80s. I can't sum up well what they told, but it was stories of a broken country. I visited St. Petersburg in 2015 and it was nowhere near what they had told. It could have been somewhere in Europe. So whatever you may think of Russia and its economy today, for all I have seen, people live a lot better, safer and more wealthy than they used to.
Re: (Score:3)
I pity you actually, you live in a country where people mindlessly believe what the government and mass media is telling them about the world. Whatever faults the Russians have, they have been cured of that one a long long time ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Whatever faults the Russians have, they have been cured of that one a long long time ago.
Unfortunately what they have isn't a cure; it's the ending stage of the disease:
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." -- Hannah Arendt
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad you are demonstrating the amazing ability to form your own opinions and convictions by ... quoting someone else?
Also let me tell you that to utter a sentence like: "They don't have any choice but to live with feckless, incompetent officials." after 4 years of Trump followed by Joe Biden seems like the height of cognitive dissonance. :)
Define 'attack' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
*If* North Korea is just getting data needed to save the lives of their citizens, without harming anybody, it's hard to condemn that. It would be nice if they compensated the Western companies for their research, but I don't know if they can actually afford that, being broke.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be nice if they compensated the Western companies for their research, but I don't know if they can actually afford that, being broke.
There are all kinds of doors open to NK if they want to join the global community.
What stats have you heard about NK and COVID?
There are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'd imagine getting on the list for vaccine would involve sharing information with the rest of the world, like every other country has done.
But the US election systems are FINE (Score:1)
Unlike 2016 and 2018 nefarious state actors didn’t make any attacks on the US Election systems.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Whose bullshit are they selling today? (Score:1)
And who the hell is buying?!
Re: (Score:3)
These announcements ALWAYS come out when there are "positive" news about to come up regarding the Russian vaccine.
For example, the previous bru-haha about them "stealing" something was exactly timed to the date of the conditional approval for manufacturing of Sputnik V. As a result our media slept though that and started screaming a month later when the condition was fulfilled and it went for manufacturing prior to completion of Stage 3. If they were paying attention to what
I'm a little puzzled (Score:1)
hacking to patent there own and sell rights at 500 (Score:2)
hacking to patent there own and sell rights at $500+ dose (that fee is just the patent usage fee that is added to other costs of the dose)
Re: (Score:2)
I cann't really understand the reason to do an attack to slow down or damage the vaccine effort,
I'd imagine the impact of COVID-19 on functioning economies is much worse than NK. They already have minimal travel and connection to the outside world. If their elderly die does it really impact the dear leader?
Dog bites man article (Score:3)
That there were only 7 attacks makes it sound like the cyber attack groups are backing off and avoiding disrupting the vaccine researchers.
Everyone in the world gets these emails and port probing attacks.
This would be an act of war if true (Score:2)
BUT, many Windows bugs look like attacks by a state actor.
No evidence for claim as usual... (Score:2)
1. NSA runs port scan through TOR
2. CIA discovers "hacking" from Russian/Korean IPs
3. Media writes Russian state actors did this or that.
4. People get scared and vote for Biden.
5. NSA & CIA gets more funding.
6. Profit.