The Russian hackspionage group Fancy Bear strikes again. This time the victim is a Ukrainian Artillery. The hack targeted a D-30 Howitzer units.
Fancy Bear – Modern Cyberwarfare
The hacking was carried out through a breach in an official Android app used by the Ukrainian military. The application was used for coordination within the military unit. Fancy Bear infected the tool with malware. This tool is used exclusively by FB and isn’t publically available. That’s a testament to the group’s large resource base. The ordeal was first reported by CrowdStrike.
Fancy Bear and the Modern Battlefield
The group Fancy Bear is allegedly connected to the government of the Russian Federation. Experts theorize that the group is financed by GRU (Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye or Main Intelligence Directorate.) FB doesn’t seem to be motivated by fame or profit like other blackhat organizations. All of the group’s activities have been in support of Russia, which furthers the theory that the Fancy Bear is a Russian hackspionage unit.
After Fancy Bear first surfaced in 2007, the group has become notorious for their pro-Russian hackings – the breach of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the hack of the French TV5Monde, and the hacking of NATO and the White House. A lot of these hacks are very hard to pull off without government funding.
This remark made from the Donald in one of the Presidential debates regarding the hack of the Democratic National Committee is correct. It’s hard for us to know where these hacks are coming from. Even a group as infamous as FB isn’t totally out of the shadows after years of activity. The massive Yahoo breach was immediately blamed on a government actor, but it’s still unclear what exactly transpired. The truth is that cyberspace is a jungle. And in the bush, skill is more important than tech.
