Cyber war scales up with new Microsoft hack – By Scott Rosenberg (Axios) / Mar 9 2021
Last week’s revelation of a new cyberattack on thousands of small businesses and organizations, on top of last year’s SolarWinds hack, shows we’ve entered a new era of mass-scale cyber war.
Why it matters: In a world that’s dependent on interlocking digital systems, there’s no escaping today’s cyber conflicts. We’re all potential victims even if we’re not participants.
The big picture: Until recently, sophisticated, state-backed hacks were typically aimed at narrow targets. Now, harm from the new nation-state cyber-fights is regularly spilling over to unprecedented numbers of companies, organizations and individuals.
- The SolarWinds attack that surfaced late last year, widely attributed to a Russian government-backed group, compromised networks at the Treasury, State, Defense and Commerce departments along with as many as 18,000 companies and institutions and left a long tail of dangerous uncertainties in its wake.
- The new incident — targeting flaws in Microsoft’s Exchange Server, widely used by small and medium-sized companies and organizations — affected 30,000 U.S. Exchange customers and many more around the world, according to Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security. Microsoft pinned the attack on a new group it dubbed Hafnium that it tied to the Chinese government.
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