Supply Chain Hackers Strike Hard at Government Entities

Supply Chain Hackers Strike Hard at Government Entities
Find out what has driven the scale of these hacks to increase and what governments can do to protect themselves from bad actors infiltrating their networks.
by SecureLink
/
April 5, 2021
SPONSORED
The recent spate of large supply chain data breaches has affected government organizations across the national, state and local levels. The SolarWinds attack discovered in December of last year exposed many top U.S. federal agencies to Russian hackers. This breach, billed as one of the largest of all time, came through an infected update from a software provider. This was followed pretty quickly by the revelation that French government agencies had been hacked in a multiyear effort, also by the Russians, that used a network monitoring tool similar to SolarWinds. And just in the last few weeks, we have heard that Accellion, a company that offers security software, was breached by ransomware hackers who used network access to infiltrate many of their clients. The list of victims includes several government organizations such as New Zealand’s National Bank and Washington state’s Auditor’s Office that handles unemployment claims (Imagine the banking and payment information the hackers can access!). It seems these sophisticated hacking groups, known as advanced persistent threats (APTs), have decided to take on a “hack once, breach many” strategy to increase the impact or profitability of their efforts. And indeed, this method can be a real force multiplier in terms of the number of organizations and volumes of data they can access. Attacks through third parties have been around for years — most notably the Target hack in 2013 where 40 million credit card numbers were stolen — but only recently have the state-sponsored bad actors really capitalized on these types of attacks.

Related Keywords

Florida , United States , Russia , Iran , France , Washington , Ukraine , Russians , French , Russian , Ukrainian , Iranian , , Auditor Office , Zealand National Bank , New Zealand , National Bank , Govtech Today , புளோரிடா , ஒன்றுபட்டது மாநிலங்களில் , ரஷ்யா , இரண் , பிரான்ஸ் , வாஷிங்டன் , உக்ரைன் , ரஷ்யர்கள் , பிரஞ்சு , ரஷ்ய , உக்ரேனிய , இராநியந் , தணிக்கையாளர் அலுவலகம் , ஜீலாந்து தேசிய வங்கி , புதியது ஜீலாந்து , தேசிய வங்கி ,