Microsoft said it detected and helped the US government to block Russian hacking attempts against at least three congressional candidates this year, a Microsoft executive revealed speaking at the Aspen Security Forum today.
Although the company refused to name the targets but said, the three candidates were "people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as an election disruption standpoint."
According to the company, the Russian hackers targeted the candidates’ staffers with phishing attacks, redirecting them to a fake Microsoft website, in an attempt to steal their credentials.
Microsoft "discovered that these [fake domains] were being registered by an activity group that at Microsoft we call Strontium...that's known as Fancy Bear or APT 28," Burt said.
"The consensus of the threat intelligence community right now is [that] we do not see the same level of activity by the Russian activity groups leading into the mid-year elections that we could see when we look back at them at that 2016 elections," he added.
For instance, Burt said the hackers are not infiltrating think tanks and targeting academia experts that they did during the 2016 presidential election.
