US experts accuse Russian hackers of hacking into White House computers

Two weeks ago, the American media announced that a group of hackers had hacked into some government computer systems. As a result, the attackers gained access to unclassified documents, in particular, to the schedule of travel of President Barack Hussein Obama. Access to the networks of the White House was obtained through the networks of the US State Department. Yesterday, US security research firm FireEye announced the results of an attack investigation.

If you believe FireEye , the hackers were from Russia. The group, named APT28, exploited previously unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and the Adobe Flash browser plugin. Vulnerability in Windows, associated with the escalation of access rights, in itself would not lead to such consequences, if not for the error in Flash, which we managed to combine with it. Adobe has already released a plug-in update, and Microsoft is still working on a patch.

The director of national intelligence of the USA, James Clapper, lamented the increased activity of Russian and Chinese hackers attacking American computers in recent months. At a meeting of the Senate, he said: "The Russian cyber threat was more serious than we previously thought."
')
In October 2014, other bezopasniki, Trend Micro Inc, described the increased activity of hackers in its report and called this wave of attacks “Operation Pawn storm” (in honor of one of the chess strategies ). Hackers used proven methods - registering similar domains and sending phishing emails that looked like notifications from sites. A few days ago, the blame for “Operation Pawn storm” was also laid on Russian hackers . In a press release from Trend Micro Inc, it stated that the target of the attack was "the US military, government and media organizations, their allies, ... NATO member countries, ... Russian Kremlin dissidents and oppositionists."