Russian hackers intensify spear-phishing attacks on US targets, Microsoft warns

Russian hackers have been sending a series of highly targeted spear-phishing emails to US government officials, academia, defense, and non-governmental organizations, according to Microsoft.

On Tuesday (Oct 29), the tech firm said in a blog post that based on its investigation of previous Midnight Blizzard spear-phishing campaigns, it assessed that the goal of this operation is “likely intelligence collection.”

It added that the threat actor had sent spear-phishing emails to “thousands of targets in over 100 organizations and contained a signed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) configuration file that connected to an actor-controlled server.”