Microsoft: Hackers targeted European think tanks and non-profit organizations

Baku. 20 February. REPORT.AZ/ Microsoft said hackers targeted European think tanks and non-profit organizations which often have contact with government officials, Report informs citing the TASS.

The attacks were carried out late last year through phishing campaigns to steal employee credentials and deliver malware, the tech giant said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The company said it detected attacks targeting employees of the German Council on Foreign Relations and European offices of The Aspen Institute and The German Marshall Fund through malicious websites and spoofed email addresses that looked legitimate.

"The attacks against these organizations, which we're disclosing with their permission, targeted 104 accounts belonging to organization employees located in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Serbia," Tom Burt, corporate vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, wrote in the blog post.

Microsoft said while it is still investigating the sources of those attacks, the company is "confident" many of them originated from a group it calls Strontium, also known as Fancy Bear. The group, which has been linked to Russia, was reportedly behind the Democratic National Committee hack before the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S.

"The attacks occurred between September and December 2018. We quickly notified each of these organizations when we discovered they were targeted so they could take steps to secure their systems, and we took a variety of technical measures to protect customers from these attacks," Microsoft said.