Microsoft: Russian cyber espionage targets 42 countries that help Ukraine

State institutions, analytical centers, companies and humanitarian organizations are targeted by hackers

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Illustration, Photo: REUTERS
Illustration, Photo: REUTERS
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

The American IT company Microsoft announced today that it has identified "strategic espionage" by hackers working for Russia in 42 countries that support Ukraine.

State institutions, analytical centers, companies and humanitarian organizations are targeted by hackers.

"Since the start of the war, Russian targeting (of Ukraine's allies) has been successful 29 percent of the time. Russian intelligence services have stepped up network penetration and espionage activities against Ukraine's allies," company president Brad Smith announced.

He added that during successful intrusions, hackers stole data in at least 25 percent of them.

Almost two-thirds of the countries targeted by hacker espionage are members of the NATO alliance.

The main target was the USA, followed by Poland.

During the past two months, espionage has been stepped up against Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Turkey.

Microsoft states that since the beginning of the war, it has not noticed intrusions into Estonia's network. The company claims there are still "significant collective defense weaknesses" in some countries.

The targets of espionage were 128 organizations, half of which were state institutions, while 12 percent of the targets were non-governmental organizations, most often analytical centers or humanitarian organizations. The remaining espionage targets were telecommunications, energy and military companies.

Microsoft states in the report that Ukraine's defense systems as a whole "proved to be stronger" than Russia's capabilities and adds that a week before the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukraine switched from local data storage on servers in state institutions to storage in the "cloud" in storage centers data across Europe.

"Since the beginning of the war, Russian cyber influence operations have successfully increased the spread of Russian propaganda by 216 percent, 82 percent of that in the US," according to Microsoft's report.

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