Photo: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images
For: The opinion Updated 06 Jan 2023, 23:24 pm EST
A team of Russian hackers attacked three US nuclear research labs last summer to obtain the passwords of scientists who work there.
According to a Reuters report, the attack was carried out between August and September of last yearwhen Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that his country would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory.
The group of hackers, known as Cold River, attacked the national laboratories from Brookhaven (BNL), Argonne (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL).
The attack consisted of create fake login pages for each institution and the sending emails to nuclear scientists in an attempt to get them to reveal their passwords.
According to the agency, since the invasion of Ukraine, Cold River has intensified its hacking campaign against kyiv’s allies and in favor of the Russian side, in the war that started in February 2022.
Previous Cold River attacks
In March 2022, almost a month after the start of the war, Cold River tried to break into NATO networks and the armies of some Eastern European countries.
At that time, the Google Threat Analysis Group revealed in a report that the attack consisted of “credential phishing campaigns” released by the Russia-based group.
“These campaigns were sent using Gmail accounts recently created to non-Google accounts, so the success rate of these campaigns is unknown,” the report said.
In May, the same group broke in and leaked emails belonging to the former head of the British spy service MI6.
In another recent spy operation, Cold River registered domain names designed to imitate at least three European NGOs who investigated war crimes. The campaign was directed against Moscow critics.
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