US and NATO Under Attack by Cyber Axis of Evil
The US and NATO are under attack again this time from the Cyber Axis of Evil, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
It has now been revealed that Russia was behind interruptions in Latvia’s mobile communications network before the commencement of Russia’s Zapad-17 war games last month. The mobile phone network along Latvia’s western coast was disrupted for seven hours on August 30th by communications jammer or jammers aimed towards Sweden from Russia’s Baltic outpost Kaliningrad. Moscow is believed to have also targeted Latvia’s emergency services’ 112 hotline on September 13th, just before the most intensive phase of Zapad-17.
Additionally, Russia has been reportedly hacking the smartphones of NATO troops in Europe in a campaign to gauge military strength, gain intelligence on operations and to intimidate soldiers. The cyber-warfare operations feature high-level coordination, use of sophisticated drones, and surveillance equipment beyond that of a non-state actor with about 4,000 NATO troops stationed in Poland and the Baltic states being targeted. Russia is known to have used the same tactics in operations against the Ukrainian military during their invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent civil war.
As well, it has emerged that hackers working for the Russian government stole details of how the US penetrates foreign computer networks and defends against cyber-attacks. The Russian hacker unit appears to have targeted a defense contractor after identifying the files through the contractor’s use of a popular antivirus software made by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab and is considered one of the most significant security breaches in recent years.
Meanwhile, the US intelligence community believes that China has likely stolen more secrets from businesses and governments than any other country through covert hacking espionage operations.
The FireEye cyber-security platform has reportedly discovered that Iranian government hackers were behind the spying and hacking of several companies in the US, Middle East, and Asia related to petrochemical industry, military, and commercial aviation.
Lastly, according to the think-tank, 38 North, Russia’s TransTeleCom started routing data from North Korea on Sunday evening in a move that will create a new internet path out of the Hermit Kingdom, increasing its resilience, and international bandwidth capacity. Now, with a new hard line to another network, North Korea’s cyber-infrastructure has a whole new added layer of resiliency. This will also allow North Korea to protect its nuclear and long-range missile programs from US cyber-attack and to further its own cyber-warfare capability and capacity. North Korea's main intelligence agency has a special Cyber-cell called Unit 180 that is believed to have launched some of most successful cyber-attacks against the Western world to date, including the global “WannaCry” ransomware attack that infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries in the Spring. They are also believed to be behind cyber bank-robberies in Bangladesh.
