Democrats say the spear- phishing attack attributed to the Russian Cozy Bear group was unsuccessful.
Today, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) claimed that Russian hackers tried to break into their servers in November 2018, shortly after the mid- term elections in the US.
The claim was made in an updated complaint in a lawsuit filed by the DNC in April 2018, the GRU Military Intelligence Service in Russia, the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, and several members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner and George Papadopoulos. In an attempt to demonstrate collusion between the Trump campaign, Russia and WikiLeaks, the DNC filed the original lawsuit. ”
In a spear- phishing campaign, dozens of DNC e- mail addresses were targeted on 14 November 2018, although there is no evidence that the attack was successful,” the DNC stated in updated court documents. ” The contents of these e- mails and their timestamps were consistent with a spearfishing campaign linked to Cozy Bear by leading cybersecurity experts( APT 29),” the DNC said.At that time, attacks were detected by several cyber security companies, which also attributed them to the Cozy Bear group. According to Crowdstrike and FireEye, spear- phishing emails were created to look like they came from an official State Department and targeted a variety of sectors, including think tanks, law enforcement, government and business information services. It was not known at the time that the e- mails were also directed to the DNC.
The Cozy Bear Group is one of the two Russian cyber espionage groups that also hacked the DNC before the 2016 US presidential election. The other group was Fancy Bear (APT28).
After the infamous DNC hack, CrowdStrike experts said that Cozy Bear seemed to be affiliated with FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, a department previously headed by Vladimir Putin a few years before he became President of Russia.
In November 2018, Russia tried to have the DNC lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that its hacking operations were considered a collection of military intelligence and were outside the jurisdiction of the US courts. In December 2018, the National Republican Congressional Committee( NRCC) revealed that during the 2018 campaign, it was the victim of cyber intrusion.
