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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2018)
NATION/WORLD Saturday, January 13, 2018 East Oregonian Page 11A Cybersecurity firm: U.S. Senate in Russian hackers’ crosshairs PARIS (AP) — The same Russian government-aligned hackers who penetrated the Democratic Party have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espi- onage campaign against the U.S. Senate, a cybersecurity firm said Friday. The revelation suggests the group often nicknamed Fancy Bear, whose hacking campaign scrambled the 2016 U.S. electoral contest, is still busy trying to gather the emails of America’s political elite. “They’re still very active — in making preparations at least — to influence public opinion again,” said Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro Inc., which published the report . “They are looking for information they might leak later.” The Senate Sergeant at Arms office, which is responsible for the upper house’s security, declined to comment. Hacquebord said he based his report on the discovery of a clutch of suspicious-looking websites dressed up to look like the U.S. Senate’s internal email system. He then cross-ref- erenced digital fingerprints associated with those sites to ones used almost exclusively by Fancy Bear, which his Tokyo-based firm dubs “Pawn Storm.” Trend Micro previously drew international attention when it used an identical technique to uncover a set of decoy websites apparently set up to harvest emails from the French presiden- tial candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in April 2017. The sites’ discovery was followed two months later by a still-unexplained publication of private emails from several Macron staffers in the final days of the race. Hacquebord said the rogue Senate sites — which were set up in June and September of 2017 — matched their French counterparts. “That is exactly the way they attacked the Macron campaign in France,” he said. Attribution is extremely tricky in the world of cybersecurity, where hackers routinely use misdirection and red herrings to fool their AP Photo/John Minchillo In this Jan. 2017 file photo, the U.S. Capitol Building is illuminated during sunrise in Washington. adversaries. But Tend Micro, which has followed Fancy Bear for years, said there could be no doubt. “We are 100 percent sure that it can attributed to the Pawn Storm group,” said Rik Ferguson, one of the Hacquebord’s colleagues. Like many cyberse- curity companies, Trend Micro refuses to speculate publicly on who is behind such groups, referring to Pawn Storm only as having “Russia-related interests.” But the U.S. intelligence community alleges that Russia’s military intelligence service pulls the hackers’ strings and a months-long Associated Press investiga- tion into the group, drawing on a vast database of targets supplied by the cybersecu- rity firm Secureworks, has determined that the group is closely attuned to the Krem- lin’s objectives. If Fancy Bear has targeted the Senate over the past few months, it wouldn’t be the first time. An AP analysis of Secureworks’ list shows that several staffers there were targeted between 2015 and 2016. Among them: Robert Zarate, now the foreign policy adviser to Florida Senator Marco Rubio; Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who now runs a Washington consultancy; and Jason Thielman, the chief of staff to Montana Senator Steve Daines. A Congressional researcher specializing in national security issues was also targeted. Fancy Bear’s interests aren’t limited to U.S. poli- tics; the group also appears to have the Olympics in mind. Trend Micro’s report said the group had set up infra- structure aimed at collecting emails from a series of Olympic winter sports federations, including the International Ski Federation, the International Ice Hockey Federation, the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Feder- ation, the International Luge Federation and the Interna- tional Biathlon Union. The targeting of Olympic groups comes as relations between Russia and the Inter- national Olympic Committee are particularly fraught. Russian athletes are being forced to compete under a neutral flag in the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics following an extraordinary doping scandal that has seen 43 athletes and several Russian officials banned for life. Amid speculation that Russia could retaliate by orchestrating the leak of prominent Olympic officials’ emails, cybersecurity firms including McAfee and ThreatConnect have picked up on signs that state-backed hackers are making moves against winter sports staff and anti-doping officials. On Wednesday, a group that has brazenly adopted the Fancy Bear nickname began publishing what appeared to be Olympics and doping-re- lated emails from between September 2016 and March 2017. The contents were largely unremarkable but their publication was covered extensively by Russian state media and some read the leak as a warning to Olympic officials not to press Moscow too hard over the doping scandal. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez A work crew cleans up an area of Highway 101 that flooded in Montecito, Calif. Most of mudslide-stricken town told to empty out MONTECITO, Calif. (AP) — Most residents of mudslide-ravaged Montecito were under orders to clear out Friday as the search for victims dragged on and crews labored to clean up massive debris and repair power, water and gas lines. Even those who didn’t lose their homes in the disaster that left at least 18 people dead were told to leave for up to two weeks so they wouldn’t interfere with the rescue and recovery operation. It was another frustrating turn for those living in the Southern California town that has been subject to repeated evacuation orders in recent weeks, first because of a monster wildfire last month, then because of downpours and mudslides. Cia Monroe said her family was lucky their home wasn’t ruined and they were all healthy and safe, though her daughter lost one of her best friends. But Monroe said it was stressful after evacuating three times during the wildfire to be packing up a fourth time. A family had offered them a room to stay overnight, but then they were looking at spending up to $3,000 a week for a hotel. “Where do you go when you’re a family of four and you don’t have a second house?” Monroe asked, noting that some residents of town have third and fourth homes. “Financially that’s a burden.” More than 1,200 workers taking part in the search and cleanup effort flooded into the town with a population of about 9,000. Curious and concerned citizens who had trudged through the mud Thursday to view the devastation were nowhere to be seen as more firefighters in bright yellow rain gear searched methodically and utility crews in orange safety vests worked with chain saws and jackhammers. A backhoe scooped up mud and rocks around buckled and flattened homes, while bulldozers cleared roads of tangled trees, muck and boulders. Tanker trucks were being used to haul off floodwa- ters sucked up from U.S. Highway 101, the crippled coastal route connecting Santa Barbara to Ventura. Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said residents who had stayed behind or tried to check on damage in neighborhoods where homes were leveled and car-size boulders blocked roads and littered properties had hindered the recovery effort. On Thursday, Brown expanded what was known as the public safety exclusion zone to incorporate most of the town. That meant even those who had stayed behind would have to leave and those who entered the zone would be subject to arrest. 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